Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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He broaches a particularly interesting vector of the reaction to climate change that was noted in Planet of the Humans, which he abstracts from something Sheldon Solomon said in the film which deals with people's religious structures and how they extend themselves into reactions to climate change (in this video the examples Dr. Ed gives are Calvinism and Arminianism).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v29-9t9Ac4

I really think he could expand this through Durkheim, ie. that these motifs get applied in the holographic sense to the degree that even the claimed irreligious have plenty of structures that they use in the exact same manner. He wasn't making the point that this was strictly a religious problem, the religious examples of it are poignant and honed in a particularly deliberate direction, but I think this comes back to the kinds of software we're exchanging and - as he brought up in the discussion - our evolutionary adaptive strategies of getting our genes into the next generation, how those strategies differ, how that difference in strategy causes seeming interminable conflict, and further how those strategies seem to prevent us from being able to process current states of reality and larger / more abstract problems accurately (which I think is the real deliverable here).
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Papus79 wrote: May 8th, 2020, 9:22 am He broaches a particularly interesting vector of the reaction to climate change that was noted in Planet of the Humans, which he abstracts from something Sheldon Solomon said in the film which deals with people's religious structures and how they extend themselves into reactions to climate change (in this video the examples Dr. Ed gives are Calvinism and Arminianism).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v29-9t9Ac4

I really think he could expand this through Durkheim, ie. that these motifs get applied in the holographic sense to the degree that even the claimed irreligious have plenty of structures that they use in the exact same manner. He wasn't making the point that this was strictly a religious problem, the religious examples of it are poignant and honed in a particularly deliberate direction, but I think this comes back to the kinds of software we're exchanging and - as he brought up in the discussion - our evolutionary adaptive strategies of getting our genes into the next generation, how those strategies differ, how that difference in strategy causes seeming interminable conflict, and further how those strategies seem to prevent us from being able to process current states of reality and larger / more abstract problems accurately (which I think is the real deliverable here).
For its propagandistic value to left politics, I tend to enjoy Michael Moore's films. He usually scores some good arguments, although he is also often caught lying. This time he only produced the film, but the director has worked with him in previous documentaries, and obviously Moore endorses its content and form. I saw the film and some responses that it aroused, including interviews with the director, Moore and his co-producer and author of Green Illusions, the book in which the film is based.

Although I found it amusing to some degree, I completely disagree with this dude Dutton on the initial comments about the merits of the film. Let's leave aside the formal aesthetic defects, which can be dismissed for the purpose of a documentary. It's hardly "absolutely brilliant", most of the footage misleadingly depicts a state of the industry that is actually outdated and at some time during the film one discovers why the need to show the whole sustainable energy movement as a scam. The purpose is to advance a core political doctrine: that the "real" problem is overpopulation, setting the stage for a Neo-Malthusian agenda, seasoned with a good dose of nihilism and apocalyptic fears, which sets the gloomy tone of the film (not far from common cliches) and disguises the usual environmentalist misanthropy. The film, however, does score some good points in depicting the negative "Midas touch" effect on social externalities due to corporate greed. I loved that Al Gore and his partners were finally exposed.

About Dutton's interpretation of a religious subtext, I think it is just the usual idealist explanation, in line with Weber's sociology, of social alienation. The world that humans construct appears to become an autonomous force that ends up controlling humans, and is to be treated like a god that must be appeased with other magical forces. It is an interesting reading, although not really original.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 8th, 2020, 8:45 pm About Dutton's interpretation of a religious subtext, I think it is just the usual idealist explanation, in line with Weber's sociology, of social alienation. The world that humans construct appears to become an autonomous force that ends up controlling humans, and is to be treated like a god that must be appeased with other magical forces. It is an interesting reading, although not really original.
I wondered if you could unpack this a bit.

My take away, and maybe it resonated with me as much because it matches a lot of my observations, is that evolutionary psychology attempts to map the nature that most people are slaves to whether they know it or not (ie. most of what they're doing when they aren't thinking or struggle to come up with a plausible explanation later tends to be toward basal ends). IMHO it's nothing new that human thought and reason isn't in control of the human world, not just that most people are asleep at the wheel and letting their genes and the needs of their genes do the driving for them - it seems tantamount to the notion that we may have by and large removed the ways in which nature externally oppressed us by conquering that environment but as far as the internal human environment - ie. from within our own biology - we're about as oppressed by both the pull and limitations of nature as we've ever been.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Papus79 wrote: May 8th, 2020, 9:32 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: May 8th, 2020, 8:45 pm About Dutton's interpretation of a religious subtext, I think it is just the usual idealist explanation, in line with Weber's sociology, of social alienation. The world that humans construct appears to become an autonomous force that ends up controlling humans, and is to be treated like a god that must be appeased with other magical forces. It is an interesting reading, although not really original.
I wondered if you could unpack this a bit.

My take away, and maybe it resonated with me as much because it matches a lot of my observations, is that evolutionary psychology attempts to map the nature that most people are slaves to whether they know it or not (ie. most of what they're doing when they aren't thinking or struggle to come up with a plausible explanation later tends to be toward basal ends). IMHO it's nothing new that human thought and reason isn't in control of the human world, not just that most people are asleep at the wheel and letting their genes and the needs of their genes do the driving for them - it seems tantamount to the notion that we may have by and large removed the ways in which nature externally oppressed us by conquering that environment but as far as the internal human environment - ie. from within our own biology - we're about as oppressed by both the pull and limitations of nature as we've ever been.
For me, Evolutionary Psychology, precisely because of being just a psychology, is fundamentally incapable of producing a sound theory of the human world. Although it can shed light on many aspects of human nature, ultimately the task of cracking the codes of the anthropological mechanisms that make up human society belongs to social science. And so this idea that some impersonal forces are in control of people without being conscious of them was originally mapped by sociology and appears in early Marx's works, influenced by Feuerbach's take on religious alienation, and also developed by Durkheim. In a general sense, all sociologies have developed a theory of alienation. So I'm skeptical of theories about genes and evolutionary adaptations explaining human culture, and particularly the claims of brain modules in Evolutionary Psychology are very much disputable. This is not to put forward neither a blank slate condition of human nature, nor a 100% social constructivist notion of it.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 9th, 2020, 1:49 pm For me, Evolutionary Psychology, precisely because of being just a psychology, is fundamentally incapable of producing a sound theory of the human world. Although it can shed light on many aspects of human nature, ultimately the task of cracking the codes of the anthropological mechanisms that make up human society belongs to social science. And so this idea that some impersonal forces are in control of people without being conscious of them was originally mapped by sociology and appears in early Marx's works, influenced by Feuerbach's take on religious alienation, and also developed by Durkheim. In a general sense, all sociologies have developed a theory of alienation. So I'm skeptical of theories about genes and evolutionary adaptations explaining human culture, and particularly the claims of brain modules in Evolutionary Psychology are very much disputable. This is not to put forward neither a blank slate condition of human nature, nor a 100% social constructivist notion of it.
I tend to find myself agreeing quite often with Bret Weinstein when he talks about these things. John Gray hints at it often in Straw Dogs as well as some of his discussions about human nature, that when people say that evil on the part of human behavior is just 'error or ignorance' he replies often that 'Well, okay, but we seem awfully fond of error'. Bret Weinstein talks about different kinds of frontier - ie. new land frontier, technological frontier, and then transfer frontier - the later of which is one group feeling a resource pinch and consequently extorting that resource from a group who can't equally defend what they have. I remember Bret talking to Mike Nayna on one of his Dark Horse podcasts and offering the idea that he's speculating - in a Faraday sort of sense (ie. predicting fields ahead of time) that in another century we'll come to the accepted conclusion that there are two dynamics occurring in society at once - one side of the dynamic is people searching for truth and trying to get truth and order out above the fray as a public good, and the counter-game to that which is classical Darwinian evolution - where the competition is for the fittest grift, the fittest deception, or the fittest form of extortion, and the later is where I see raging cases of cluster B personality disorder actually winning the race quite often, especially dominating a generation like Millenials who were taught to not be competitive (ie. the people doing this were making veal for sociopaths and in their own sort of Scientology spin on secular humanism had no clue that this is what they were doing).

I think evolutionary game theory, at a minimum, goes much farther at explaining the persistence if interpersonal cruelty, even the degree that it's intertwined with status and winning, and the degree to which status and money is even held as the pinnacle of human value only makes any sense if it's held up against the lens of nature red in tooth and nail. I also remember Elon Musk in the last few days on Joe Rogan trying to talk about contagious bad ideas or how those ideas catch on, and IMHO if it's an unconditionally bad idea it has no reason to catch on, however if its an idea that's great for extorting the commons or creating a zero-sum game that no one in the vicinity can refuse without getting trampled (like ruthlessness and hiding externalities in business for example or juicing in baseball) seems like it's expressly how a bad idea catches - ie. it caters to Darwinian survival strategies of the sort that are anti-social. One of the mistakes we've made in liberal democracies and the psychology that we've created around them was along the lines that pro-social adaptive strategies are superior to anti-social adaptive strategies, and... well... that depends a lot on the given climate and that also depends on just how dangerous and powerful the anti-social strategy makes people or how vulnerable and unprotected the pro-social strategy might make those who take it up (Greta talks about this often something along the lines of cooperators and defectors where if you're a cooperator in an environment of mostly defectors you'll get eaten for lunch).
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Yes, I have listened to Weinstein and friends expressing their usual Darwinian views on society. His appearance in Joe Rogan's show started making me wonder if he's not actually leaning towards Social Darwinism under the spell of libertarian politics. I don't think he deserves much attention, but I did heartedly side with him in the Evergreen College confrontation.

Dawkins is another one whom I respect a lot as a biologist, but I don't buy his meme theory as a useful explanation of cultural dynamics.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 9th, 2020, 5:36 pm Yes, I have listened to Weinstein and friends expressing their usual Darwinian views on society. His appearance in Joe Rogan's show started making me wonder if he's not actually leaning towards Social Darwinism under the spell of libertarian politics. I don't think he deserves much attention, but I did heartedly side with him in the Evergreen College confrontation.

Dawkins is another one whom I respect a lot as a biologist, but I don't buy his meme theory as a useful explanation of cultural dynamics.
I guess in this case, much like my non-materialism, I've been overwhelmed with anecdotal evidence that they're right - ie. that human beings are playing a game of Darwinian stomp-out with each other under a think veneer of civility, and it shows up in the massive incongruities between what people say vs. what they do. Quite often you get far enough in checking in with their self-awareness to find out that this is what happens in their lapses of self-awareness which they backfill - to themselves as much as anyone who asks - with more benign reasoning or 'I don't know - I just felt like it'. That kind of unanimity of form when people run on autopilot tells me a lot and it's in line with the notion that the animal runs the show when we aren't manually suppressing it through some degree of self-aware interrogation of our own interiority and impulses.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Papus79 wrote: May 9th, 2020, 9:08 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: May 9th, 2020, 5:36 pm Yes, I have listened to Weinstein and friends expressing their usual Darwinian views on society. His appearance in Joe Rogan's show started making me wonder if he's not actually leaning towards Social Darwinism under the spell of libertarian politics. I don't think he deserves much attention, but I did heartedly side with him in the Evergreen College confrontation.

Dawkins is another one whom I respect a lot as a biologist, but I don't buy his meme theory as a useful explanation of cultural dynamics.
I guess in this case, much like my non-materialism, I've been overwhelmed with anecdotal evidence that they're right - ie. that human beings are playing a game of Darwinian stomp-out with each other under a think veneer of civility, and it shows up in the massive incongruities between what people say vs. what they do. Quite often you get far enough in checking in with their self-awareness to find out that this is what happens in their lapses of self-awareness which they backfill - to themselves as much as anyone who asks - with more benign reasoning or 'I don't know - I just felt like it'. That kind of unanimity of form when people run on autopilot tells me a lot and it's in line with the notion that the animal runs the show when we aren't manually suppressing it through some degree of self-aware interrogation of our own interiority and impulses.
A new paper is out, causing controversy: This Philosopher Is Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology, and I hope it is the beginning of the end for Pinker and friends.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Of all of evolutionary psychology's claims those claiming an ability to know past neurological structures that we don't have direct access to in order to study in a laboratory are probably the weakest. Evolutionary game theory, in the hear and now and watching the priorities of mate selection in the present and watching how status games work, is a much different story. I can't say anything about Sabrina, she sounds from the article to be quite professional and thoughtful, but in many online connversations I've been in I notice that it's quite often people who just don't like what ev psych has to say who seem to hope that the whole structure of it can be ripped down, even evolutionary game theory in the present, by launching torpedoes at the historical projections.

I'd really challenge those same people - take a look at the spread between the late 90's projections that the internet would have people far more learned, far more peaceful, that group conflict would disappear and be replaced by singing kumbaya together through knowledge, hold that up against what we've actually seen (nature in all of it's predation and grifting making its way to electronic media), look at who the US and UK have as president and prime minister, look at the rise of right and left-wing populism in Europe, or even better - why technological progress ends up being a race for one's right to live rather than more people working fewer hours on living wages, and come up with a theory that explains that gap better than an ongoing stochastic process such as evolution where power, wealth, and mating opportunities are hashing themselves out through the wide open vistas of what physics will allow. If I were to give any hints on that - 'real Marxism' has been tried, unfortunately it was tried with 'real people' rather than the Platonic rational entities it needed.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Papus79 wrote:Of all of evolutionary psychology's claims those claiming an ability to know past neurological structures that we don't have direct access to in order to study in a laboratory are probably the weakest. Evolutionary game theory, in the hear and now and watching the priorities of mate selection in the present and watching how status games work, is a much different story.
In the long run I don't see much of a difference between them. One posits the existence of adaptive cognitive modules that would explain behaviors in terms of their fitness value, and the other will explain behavior in terms of its own social dynamic, but ultimately this whole non-biological, cultural adaptation, is referred to its fitness value in evolutionary terms. Individual rationality is replaced as the key force of social change, which is good, but at the expense of leaving us with a broader rationality hovering as a natural deterministic force over society. As we have spoken before, this mimics the sense of how society really works, because indeed collective strategies operate as uncontrolled forces imposed over individuals, who are often not aware there's a collective strategy at all, but the question is whether these forces are natural determinisms obeying a biological evolutionary purpose, or a process that emerges from nature and evolves (culturally) according to other laws not reducible to principles of biologic evolution. Both Evolutionary Psychology and evolutionary game theory endorse some type of natural teleology, or at best a determinism that suits well to some organisms with high levels of socialization, like insects, but don't really fit in explanations about human society. When someone says to me that typical behavior of males and females in some human group environments (office, school, etc.) can be explained in terms of intrasexual competition, I nod in agreement that this is an interesting point (after all no good sociological theory could conceive society as separate from nature), but that it should be taken cautiously. It may be a natural tendency, but it does not rise to the surface and become relevant if some cultural mechanisms are not in place. And it is very unlikely that game theory will predict relevant statistical results from evolutionary strategies in given environments.
Papus79 wrote:...take a look at the spread between the late 90's projections that the internet would have people far more learned, far more peaceful, that group conflict would disappear and be replaced by singing kumbaya together through knowledge, hold that up against what we've actually seen (nature in all of it's predation and grifting making its way to electronic media), look at who the US and UK have as president and prime minister, look at the rise of right and left-wing populism in Europe, or even better - why technological progress ends up being a race for one's right to live rather than more people working fewer hours on living wages,
I don't think that contradicting Evolutionary Psychology implies endorsing or having endorsed those predictions. And how things have turned out to be don't give any more credibility to the view that the world is moved by natural forces. In such view, there's a tendency to favor a historical narrative of primeval instincts taking over, claiming the return to a savage state where humans are nothing but brute animals fighting to survive. A very convenient ideology for libertarian economists and Social Darwinists.
Papus79 wrote:...and come up with a theory that explains that gap better than an ongoing stochastic process such as evolution where power, wealth, and mating opportunities are hashing themselves out through the wide open vistas of what physics will allow. If I were to give any hints on that - 'real Marxism' has been tried, unfortunately it was tried with 'real people' rather than the Platonic rational entities it needed.
Marx and Engels were very excited after the publication of On The Origin of Species, as they found it would help the foundation of a materialist science of society, but part of the excitement came from the idea that Darwin's work was a nail in the coffin of teleology and essentialism.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2020, 5:55 pm Individual rationality is replaced as the key force of social change, which is good, but at the expense of leaving us with a broader rationality hovering as a natural deterministic force over society.
There actually seems to be a strange sort of inverse trade-off between self-awareness and falling right into those currents. I don't quite know where to look for peer reviewed research papers to check my observations against because I haven't run into may people who'll phrase things the way I'm seeing them. I do to some degree see Eric Weinstein and Daniel Schmachtenberger hitting notes that parallel my observations (seeing Eric interview Daniel on The Portal was great) and a place where I see their sense-making on that side of the human condition going, where I don't think I've ever heard them say it, is that people have such a revulsion to reason and intellect (ie 'nerds', 'dorks', casting reason and intellect generally as a 'loser' thing unless it's purely honed for social status or financial gain) and the way so many people seem to run full speed at the power game rather than the truth or sense-making game, really suggests that there's something deeply incompatable and even zero-sum between the two strategies. A good way to put it - facts don't care about feelings and feelings reciprocally don't care about facts. Sam Harris talks about how his mind and will can't resist the power of an argument superior to his own, that seems to fall in line more with a particular kind of temperament that he has (that I can relate to) and I also notice just how many people I run into, most even, where tribe is all that matters and there really aren't facts - just football teams to root for where whatever 'facts' your tribe believes or rejects amounts to tribal heraldry and to rationally scrutinize those beliefs is to not 'get it'. Unfortunately that dynamic seems so strong that I worry it's set to shake our culture to its foundations as the kind of competition it promotes can't work with exponential technology.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2020, 5:55 pmAs we have spoken before, this mimics the sense of how society really works, because indeed collective strategies operate as uncontrolled forces imposed over individuals, who are often not aware there's a collective strategy at all, but the question is whether these forces are natural determinisms obeying a biological evolutionary purpose, or a process that emerges from nature and evolves (culturally) according to other laws not reducible to principles of biologic evolution.
I don't think it will ever be 100% one thing or another, the world's too complex for clear lines in that sense so it'll always be some combination of what a contest between billions of conscious agents looks like combined with what tools are out on the playing field. Then the degree to which departure from old environments does fundamentally change us we're still looking for ways to make empirical evaluations of that sort of thing.

I think maybe one thing I would say - I think we'd be wisest to look at where the chaos is as our signal for what we need to inspect and find some way to positively harness or sublimate back into order next. Tribal politics seems to be the elephant in the room these days. It's a bit like rivalrous games and competitions can expand out just about anywhere that otherwise restraining forces are no longer present to hold them in some sort of civil abeyance. Something Daniel mentioned above has hit on a lot (his War on Sensemaking series on Rebel Wisdom) - the internet has become a disinformation machine largely by how many people are playing information warfare between groups and using everything from outright conspiracy theories and kayfabe to more subtle things like rigging what look like scientific experiments with significant flaws in their premises for the sake of influencing public opinion. The trick is figuring out whether there's a way to close that gap through cultural changes rather than governmental ones (which often is a quick emergency fix but offers no lasting solution and the chaos just pops out somewhere else - let alone the risks to liberty in pulling that card too often). At least from the efforts of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries religion has been considerably tamed but it seems like the public parochialism has simply found new grounds and there too the landscape of grifts needs every bit as much of a rebuttal from collective sanity if we want to make it past this point with functional democracies.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2020, 5:55 pmBoth Evolutionary Psychology and evolutionary game theory endorse some type of natural teleology, or at best a determinism that suits well to some organisms with high levels of socialization, like insects, but don't really fit in explanations about human society.
I guess it's tough for me to follow that use of the word determinism. As far as I can tell all actions are happening in sequence, a person is exactly who they are at a given moment, they know exactly what they know - no more no less, same for what they're thinking or want/don't want to do, and so there's nothing else that a person can do aside from what was next in the flow of information that they're internally managing. In that sense it doesn't seem like anything would be more determined or less determined. People might try to draw distinctions between what a person is forced to do by another person or by circumstance vs. what they'd rather do if given the liberty but wants and desires themselves don't seem to be willed and the ways in which we maintain them have a lot do do with softer forms of necessity - like reputation, assimilating into a culture, etc.. Higher order insects, from what little I know, have a genetic interrelationship (haploid diploid?) that we don't and so it would seem that were less strictly hive-minded, I'd say determinism is just as alive and well with us but it's far more like the chaotic/complex determinism of weather patterns for us than it is something that would seem direct-drive such as hive or colony insects or flocks of starling.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2020, 5:55 pmWhen someone says to me that typical behavior of males and females in some human group environments (office, school, etc.) can be explained in terms of intrasexual competition, I nod in agreement that this is an interesting point (after all no good sociological theory could conceive society as separate from nature), but that it should be taken cautiously. It may be a natural tendency, but it does not rise to the surface and become relevant if some cultural mechanisms are not in place. And it is very unlikely that game theory will predict relevant statistical results from evolutionary strategies in given environments.
I think at worst one could say that they're seeing what appears to be spontaneous behavior among peers that spins up positive feedback loops, consensus ends up happening in strange ways along these axis, and such things end up creating a gravity well that in any one of these people's self-report doesn't match their values, ideals, or preferences but sucks them into a funnel regardless. I think the tendency to read Darwinian processes into such phenomena is there's a sense that such forms of conformity are a sense that an arms-race of some kind is on and that if one doesn't join in they'll be left behind. That gets back to what some people talk about with 'viral ideas' or 'mind viruses', ie. such ideas need to have some degree of 'offer you can't refuse' baked into them for them to really go viral - otherwise it seems they'd fall flat as there's be no sense of compulsion for people to fall into them. In that sense someone might be right in their assessment that what they're spotting is an abstract loop of competition but how much of it is gender competition, how much of it even might be better accounted for specific gender vulnerabilities each way and a more defensive stance being taken, and how much of it is just people letting their mirror neurons take them for a ride - I'd agree that much is difficult to sort out with precision but that survival mechanisms underwrite a lot of it doesn't seem like it would be a particularly controversial claim.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2020, 5:55 pmI don't think that contradicting Evolutionary Psychology implies endorsing or having endorsed those predictions. And how things have turned out to be don't give any more credibility to the view that the world is moved by natural forces. In such view, there's a tendency to favor a historical narrative of primeval instincts taking over, claiming the return to a savage state where humans are nothing but brute animals fighting to survive. A very convenient ideology for libertarian economists and Social Darwinists.
It's definitely not a good thing to favor, and if people took evolutionary game theory - rather than a warning - as something to more dutifully throw themselves into, then yes - we'd definitely be headed toward a very social-Darwinian sort of neo-Feudalism. I think the part of it that's caught my interest, although for as much as my opinion and expectations of humanity have steadily plummeted I do wonder if it might have been a bit of lingering secular humanist naivety on my part (along Sam Harris lines), that if people were no longer subconsciously or unconsciously participating in these sorts of behaviors - which seem to quite often cut directly against what they'd publicly say about their own morals and ideals - that either with the added self-awareness they'd stop falling into it or enough people would break free of it to establish social norms that could hold it in check again and restore some sense of sanity. The ways in which it seems to whip crowds around almost like inorganic substances seems to be directly predicated on people's abdication of self-awareness.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 15th, 2020, 5:55 pmMarx and Engels were very excited after the publication of On The Origin of Species, as they found it would help the foundation of a materialist science of society, but part of the excitement came from the idea that Darwin's work was a nail in the coffin of teleology and essentialism.
I think, if I'm understanding you correctly at this point, this is more of a warning about too much investment in ideas that are still only half-baked. To that end when people get in the habit of finding a hammer and thinking everything is a nail they fall into an ideology, which seems to offer a certain kind of panacea (in their own minds or on paper) until it goes into practice - where at that point it has its proper collision with reality and in many cases, when it's something people take too seriously or too literally there ends up being a lot of loss of life and human suffering involved. That's why I tend to be far more optimistic about people rigorously trying to apply nuance to take situations apart and I find it utterly depressing when friends of mine fall asleep listening to those sorts of conversations because what they really want is some sort of heated argument or food-fight.

There's a sense too right now that we're at a sort of interregnum, that the sense-making structures that got us through the 20th century are rapidly falling apart and the sense making structures for the 21st century are still under construction (Jordan Hall likes to refer to that as 'Blue Church vs. Red Religion'). Whatever the case may be - it seems like the biggest problem we're having is just how many people are observationally asleep at the wheel, so they're largely useless for buffering society at the best of times and they become active liabilities when a social current grabs them by the cerebellum and sucks them into some sort of gravity funnel that they might not even reflect much on in hindsight aside from marveling at what an emotional rush it was.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

Post by Count Lucanor »

Papus79 wrote:There actually seems to be a strange sort of inverse trade-off between self-awareness and falling right into those currents. I don't quite know where to look for peer reviewed research papers to check my observations against because I haven't run into may people who'll phrase things the way I'm seeing them. I do to some degree see Eric Weinstein and Daniel Schmachtenberger hitting notes that parallel my observations (seeing Eric interview Daniel on The Portal was great) and a place where I see their sense-making on that side of the human condition going,
I'll try to check that out later and comment. I already saw it is three hours long, so it will take me a while.
Papus79 wrote:where I don't think I've ever heard them say it, is that people have such a revulsion to reason and intellect (ie 'nerds', 'dorks', casting reason and intellect generally as a 'loser' thing unless it's purely honed for social status or financial gain) and the way so many people seem to run full speed at the power game rather than the truth or sense-making game, really suggests that there's something deeply incompatable and even zero-sum between the two strategies. A good way to put it - facts don't care about feelings and feelings reciprocally don't care about facts. Sam Harris talks about how his mind and will can't resist the power of an argument superior to his own, that seems to fall in line more with a particular kind of temperament that he has (that I can relate to) and I also notice just how many people I run into, most even, where tribe is all that matters and there really aren't facts - just football teams to root for where whatever 'facts' your tribe believes or rejects amounts to tribal heraldry and to rationally scrutinize those beliefs is to not 'get it'. Unfortunately that dynamic seems so strong that I worry it's set to shake our culture to its foundations as the kind of competition it promotes can't work with exponential technology.
I can relate, as so many people, to that sentiment. It would be impossible not to notice how must of our everyday culture runs with the fuel provided by the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid. But thinking that this somehow is the expression of a primeval irrational instinct that takes control despite any civilizatory efforts is a different approach from those who think it precisely comes along with the civilizatory effort, or better said, with the technical rationality ingrained in capitalist society. Here we'll be getting closer to the Frankfurt's School concept of "irrational rationality", a theme that will most likely send us back to our first mention of Weber. There's also the McLuhan approach to the problem with the concept of the global village, of which I find most interesting the resemblance of this technologically interconnected society to the traditional folk society, with its small town mentality and its oral traditions, including the spread of rumors as a predominant form of communication. In any case, the point is that there are sociological theses out there that tackle the problem from a historical point of view, not necessarily succumbing to the temptations of Evolutionary Psychology and Social Darwinism.
Papus79 wrote: I don't think it will ever be 100% one thing or another, the world's too complex for clear lines in that sense so it'll always be some combination of what a contest between billions of conscious agents looks like combined with what tools are out on the playing field. Then the degree to which departure from old environments does fundamentally change us we're still looking for ways to make empirical evaluations of that sort of thing.

I think maybe one thing I would say - I think we'd be wisest to look at where the chaos is as our signal for what we need to inspect and find some way to positively harness or sublimate back into order next. Tribal politics seems to be the elephant in the room these days. It's a bit like rivalrous games and competitions can expand out just about anywhere that otherwise restraining forces are no longer present to hold them in some sort of civil abeyance. Something Daniel mentioned above has hit on a lot (his War on Sensemaking series on Rebel Wisdom) - the internet has become a disinformation machine largely by how many people are playing information warfare between groups and using everything from outright conspiracy theories and kayfabe to more subtle things like rigging what look like scientific experiments with significant flaws in their premises for the sake of influencing public opinion. The trick is figuring out whether there's a way to close that gap through cultural changes rather than governmental ones (which often is a quick emergency fix but offers no lasting solution and the chaos just pops out somewhere else - let alone the risks to liberty in pulling that card too often). At least from the efforts of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries religion has been considerably tamed but it seems like the public parochialism has simply found new grounds and there too the landscape of grifts needs every bit as much of a rebuttal from collective sanity if we want to make it past this point with functional democracies.
I think we can all almost unanimously agree that this is what we observe: tribal rivalry, power games, anti-intellectualism. It is all well documented. Those of us who feel uneasy with the current state of affairs at a global level, are probably somehow still attached to the utopia of civilizatory progress of the old Enlightenment project, a project that people like Habermas still think can be (and should be) rescued. So do I, although I won't subscribe particularly to Habermas political ideas, not as clever as the rest of his philosophical insights. In any case, for me this inevitably translates into socialist politics, and there's a bunch of proposals thrown at the political arena that want to deal with these matters, ultimately boiling down to Rosa Luxemburg's motto: socialism or barbarism. Nevertheless, I don't think anyone should be so naive as to envision a purely rational society managing all aspects of people's lives. Perhaps in general, irrational tendencies are to be put in check constantly, but strict technocratic and bureaucratic controls would be contrary to the requirements of pluralism and diversity of a true democratic society. I really never reject completely any reference to the irrational tendencies within the so called human condition, and as I always say: a little bit of Marx and a little bit of Nietzsche can get along well.
Papus79 wrote: I guess it's tough for me to follow that use of the word determinism. As far as I can tell all actions are happening in sequence, a person is exactly who they are at a given moment, they know exactly what they know - no more no less, same for what they're thinking or want/don't want to do, and so there's nothing else that a person can do aside from what was next in the flow of information that they're internally managing. In that sense it doesn't seem like anything would be more determined or less determined. People might try to draw distinctions between what a person is forced to do by another person or by circumstance vs. what they'd rather do if given the liberty but wants and desires themselves don't seem to be willed and the ways in which we maintain them have a lot do do with softer forms of necessity - like reputation, assimilating into a culture, etc.. Higher order insects, from what little I know, have a genetic interrelationship (haploid diploid?) that we don't and so it would seem that were less strictly hive-minded, I'd say determinism is just as alive and well with us but it's far more like the chaotic/complex determinism of weather patterns for us than it is something that would seem direct-drive such as hive or colony insects or flocks of starling.
I just think individual psychology and behavior don't explain themselves according to the Hobbesian atomistic model of classical liberalism. Individual actions always operate in social and historical contexts, and these contexts include not only material conditions of existence, of which the individual is not always particularly aware of, but contexts of meaning, also determined socially and historically. This is what allows, anyway, any talk about "game theory" and cooperation strategies at the level of species, although the naturalistic interpretation got it all wrong. As a metaphor, I do think it sounds nice. I once wrote a paper for a contest and its title could be translated: "The city game: from chance to cooperation strategies". It started with a reference to Nash.

Anyway, at the level of individual cognition, I think we are mostly endowed with general purpose faculties combined with a high degree of neurocortical plasticity. If there are some modularized capacities, they appear to be only in subcortical regions common to all mammals, which imply tendencies that can be overturned by culture. This is, I think, what is at the core of the gender debate.
Papus79 wrote:I think the tendency to read Darwinian processes into such phenomena is there's a sense that such forms of conformity are a sense that an arms-race of some kind is on and that if one doesn't join in they'll be left behind. That gets back to what some people talk about with 'viral ideas' or 'mind viruses', ie. such ideas need to have some degree of 'offer you can't refuse' baked into them for them to really go viral - otherwise it seems they'd fall flat as there's be no sense of compulsion for people to fall into them. In that sense someone might be right in their assessment that what they're spotting is an abstract loop of competition but how much of it is gender competition, how much of it even might be better accounted for specific gender vulnerabilities each way and a more defensive stance being taken, and how much of it is just people letting their mirror neurons take them for a ride - I'd agree that much is difficult to sort out with precision but that survival mechanisms underwrite a lot of it doesn't seem like it would be a particularly controversial claim.
Yes, most of this talk is rather politically motivated, than scientifically assessed. But perhaps it has to be, as ultimately we're dealing with social sciences. Let's not forget also that there's another broad philosophical project which encompasses and nurtures some of these views, outside of naturalism and more committed to social constructivism, but ultimately rejecting the Enlightenment project. Current tribal or identity politics can also be traced back to the idealist phenomenologist project, as the subject is historically constituted, and it will the experience of power struggles (according to Foucault) or interpretation of discursive oppression (according to Derrida) that will determine its possibilities.
Papus79 wrote: I think, if I'm understanding you correctly at this point, this is more of a warning about too much investment in ideas that are still only half-baked. To that end when people get in the habit of finding a hammer and thinking everything is a nail they fall into an ideology, which seems to offer a certain kind of panacea (in their own minds or on paper) until it goes into practice - where at that point it has its proper collision with reality and in many cases, when it's something people take too seriously or too literally there ends up being a lot of loss of life and human suffering involved. That's why I tend to be far more optimistic about people rigorously trying to apply nuance to take situations apart and I find it utterly depressing when friends of mine fall asleep listening to those sorts of conversations because what they really want is some sort of heated argument or food-fight.
Actually my point was that for Marx and Engels, eliminating teleology from natural sciences meant the opportunity for a scientific approach in social sciences, where man was "...at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." In that sense, it meant a hammer against ideology. Of course, there will always be political interests in the background, not in the sense of political activism, but in the sense of having views about how societies work and what elements intervene in their transformation. Then even the ones pretending to be apolitical will be politicized, perhaps the most politicized of all, given that most of the time they assume as a given a doctrine of what society is. This is what clearly transpired in the Weinstein/Peterson interchange in Rogan's show (or at least the part that I watched, since I'm not a fan of that show). They both obviously think they're outside of the type of political activism that they eagerly criticize, but even trying or pretending to be objective, they have to take a stance, which can be identified with some political agenda, whether they are aware of it or not. And then some complain why Peterson is identified as a right-winger, since he doesn't identify himself with it.
Papus79 wrote:
There's a sense too right now that we're at a sort of interregnum, that the sense-making structures that got us through the 20th century are rapidly falling apart and the sense making structures for the 21st century are still under construction (Jordan Hall likes to refer to that as 'Blue Church vs. Red Religion'). Whatever the case may be - it seems like the biggest problem we're having is just how many people are observationally asleep at the wheel, so they're largely useless for buffering society at the best of times and they become active liabilities when a social current grabs them by the cerebellum and sucks them into some sort of gravity funnel that they might not even reflect much on in hindsight aside from marveling at what an emotional rush it was.
I think we're living in "interesting" times because of the general capitalist crisis, and political polarization will be hardly avoided. People will be forced to get involved, not anymore in relation to a distant political discourse that hardly distracted them from their everyday lives, but from the very perspective of their everyday lives. Maybe they'll act dumb, will fall for populist leaders and buffoons, but observational asleep they will not remain.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

Post by Papus79 »

Count Lucanor wrote: May 16th, 2020, 10:59 pm I think we can all almost unanimously agree that this is what we observe: tribal rivalry, power games, anti-intellectualism. It is all well documented. Those of us who feel uneasy with the current state of affairs at a global level, are probably somehow still attached to the utopia of civilizatory progress of the old Enlightenment project, a project that people like Habermas still think can be (and should be) rescued. So do I, although I won't subscribe particularly to Habermas political ideas, not as clever as the rest of his philosophical insights. In any case, for me this inevitably translates into socialist politics, and there's a bunch of proposals thrown at the political arena that want to deal with these matters, ultimately boiling down to Rosa Luxemburg's motto: socialism or barbarism. Nevertheless, I don't think anyone should be so naive as to envision a purely rational society managing all aspects of people's lives. Perhaps in general, irrational tendencies are to be put in check constantly, but strict technocratic and bureaucratic controls would be contrary to the requirements of pluralism and diversity of a true democratic society. I really never reject completely any reference to the irrational tendencies within the so called human condition, and as I always say: a little bit of Marx and a little bit of Nietzsche can get along well.
I'm finding myself increasingly interested in Jim Rutt's GameB for a lot of these reasons - particularly that it's a direction in which we really need to shift our focus if we wish to find some counterbalance to keep our culture alive and going without running infinite growth off the rails. A lot of people have been bringing out Thomas Sowell's 'There are no solutions - only tradeoffs' lately and I think this is likely correct but only a very particular context, ie. low-hanging fruit. Technological progress done right seems to be a buffer against frailty and if we try too hard to optimize without such progress we end up grossly overextended - a great example being how our hyper-optimized globalism, and similarly optimized medical establishment, has been thrashed by Covid which exposed the frailties of such an endeavor. The idea of Dunbars in Proto-B's that Jim has also seems to make a great deal of sense.

In the past year I was also quite positive about Andrew Yang's campaign in the US. For a lot of demographic reasons I figured he couldn't take the nomination but I was at least hoping he'd make a significant impact on what kind of conversation the front-runners had. Similarly, with his idea of UBI, it makes sense that the slack needs to be picked up if we're going to go to a gig economy and depend in any way on the economics of home ownership - ie. precarious job markets make that extremely difficult for anyone to maintain.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 16th, 2020, 10:59 pm I just think individual psychology and behavior don't explain themselves according to the Hobbesian atomistic model of classical liberalism. Individual actions always operate in social and historical contexts, and these contexts include not only material conditions of existence, of which the individual is not always particularly aware of, but contexts of meaning, also determined socially and historically. This is what allows, anyway, any talk about "game theory" and cooperation strategies at the level of species, although the naturalistic interpretation got it all wrong. As a metaphor, I do think it sounds nice. I once wrote a paper for a contest and its title could be translated: "The city game: from chance to cooperation strategies". It started with a reference to Nash.

Anyway, at the level of individual cognition, I think we are mostly endowed with general purpose faculties combined with a high degree of neurocortical plasticity. If there are some modularized capacities, they appear to be only in subcortical regions common to all mammals, which imply tendencies that can be overturned by culture. This is, I think, what is at the core of the gender debate.
I thought about this a bit last night, especially the last part, and to an extend what I think the deliverable of the above observations might be well stated as: there's a good chance that what people are trying to package as 'evolutionary game theory' is just game theory itself and evolution bears the marks of game theory because it's downstream from game theory. The suggestion that it doesn't seem like there's much space for considerably 'strong' firmware makes most of it culturally mutable. Assuming all of these things the next question might be what minimum thresholds of abundance or opportunity are needed to keep us from falling back on subcortical coding and in turn antisocial or sociopathic behavior in response to environmental queues in that direction.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 16th, 2020, 10:59 pmYes, most of this talk is rather politically motivated, than scientifically assessed. But perhaps it has to be, as ultimately we're dealing with social sciences. Let's not forget also that there's another broad philosophical project which encompasses and nurtures some of these views, outside of naturalism and more committed to social constructivism, but ultimately rejecting the Enlightenment project. Current tribal or identity politics can also be traced back to the idealist phenomenologist project, as the subject is historically constituted, and it will the experience of power struggles (according to Foucault) or interpretation of discursive oppression (according to Derrida) that will determine its possibilities.
I think postmodernism has had a place most notably in attempting to retrace the formation of our stack of modern-day knowledge and remove the dead wood in situations where the current state of knowledge might be underwritten by nothing more than political or historical accidents which, cleared away, could help us remove false limits to our study of reality to then figure out what sorts of things that those false assumptions were hiding. Similarly there were people like Paul Feyerabend who, as far as I can tell, were attempting to locate the limitations of various kinds of method and where we might be bringing the wrong tools to a particular job.

Where that has broken down - pop postmodernism, which is ripe for all sorts of abuse because it tells many people exactly what they don't want to hear, ie. that authority of any time telling them what not to do (competent and incompetent alike) is oppression and that they should be able to do whatever they want to do without social consequence. For the maintenance of society people try to buffer the consequence of irrational or deluded actors which partially protects everyone else but also seems to embolden people who've taken that message to heart under the assessment that it's validation. OTOH it's only a matter of time before they run into what society pads them from contact with - ie. the inhuman aspects of nature where there's no such thing as deliberate attempts at harm reduction, and the trouble in a global society - it's difficult to clear a big enough circle around them to eat the consequences by themselves.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 16th, 2020, 10:59 pmYActually my point was that for Marx and Engels, eliminating teleology from natural sciences meant the opportunity for a scientific approach in social sciences, where man was "...at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." In that sense, it meant a hammer against ideology. Of course, there will always be political interests in the background, not in the sense of political activism, but in the sense of having views about how societies work and what elements intervene in their transformation. Then even the ones pretending to be apolitical will be politicized, perhaps the most politicized of all, given that most of the time they assume as a given a doctrine of what society is. This is what clearly transpired in the Weinstein/Peterson interchange in Rogan's show (or at least the part that I watched, since I'm not a fan of that show). They both obviously think they're outside of the type of political activism that they eagerly criticize, but even trying or pretending to be objective, they have to take a stance, which can be identified with some political agenda, whether they are aware of it or not. And then some complain why Peterson is identified as a right-winger, since he doesn't identify himself with it.
Part of why people still read Marx as far as I can tell is that many of his critics of capitalism were poignant and especially so at the height of the industrial revolution. Plenty of his criticisms, especially around family and recreation time, are equally fair in a culture where it's getting more common for people to work 60-80 hour weeks for buying power they used to get in 40 to 50 hours per week.

On the inability to avoid sides or politicization - I think that's the case because the moment one comes in contact with other people who either disagree with them or want them to conform to a position or set of suppositions that they either do or don't agree with then they end up defining what they're not (politically speaking) as much as they may positively assign themselves to one particular zone in people's minds. I think the biggest problem is the heuristics we use right now - ie. right and left is too crude, the version of this map weighing both polls against an axis called 'libertarian vs authoritarian' is at least a bit more useful as 'libertarian' in the open rather than economic sense tends to be conservatives and liberals who can get along much better with each other than their authoritarian counterparts, but I think one of the muddiest areas has to be the idea of 'centrism'. There are probably so many different ways to be centrist with such different outcomes that it almost seems to do more damage not to carve that notion up. Neoliberals would be considered centrist, classic liberals would be considered centrist, many libertarians would be average as centrist, same for many minarchists, and so they may vary considerably on their preference for size of government or what government's roll is. To handle that correctly you'd at least need then three dimensions.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 16th, 2020, 10:59 pmI think we're living in "interesting" times because of the general capitalist crisis, and political polarization will be hardly avoided. People will be forced to get involved, not anymore in relation to a distant political discourse that hardly distracted them from their everyday lives, but from the very perspective of their everyday lives. Maybe they'll act dumb, will fall for populist leaders and buffoons, but observational asleep they will not remain.
Any particular familiarity with or thoughts on Mark Blyth? I've been listening to him a while, IMHO he's brilliant however it can be a bit hard to follow him into the weeds. He had a couple lectures 'How we got here and why' and 'Can we have it all?' from last year which I thought were particularly informative and especially as he was talking about attempts to rebuild meso-layers of economics as well as figuring out ways to recycle stuck assets. I also got some good insights from these videos on all of the drawbacks of the gold standard and why we got away from it. The worrying thing about MMT though - the tendency to over-leverage seems to make it relatively combustible and then while it's true that government debt is not the same as household debt it still, just intuitively, has to have limits even if they're harder to trace when we're dealing with public and international investor confidence as the limits.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

Post by Count Lucanor »

Papus79 wrote:I'm finding myself increasingly interested in Jim Rutt's GameB for a lot of these reasons - particularly that it's a direction in which we really need to shift our focus if we wish to find some counterbalance to keep our culture alive and going without running infinite growth off the rails. A lot of people have been bringing out Thomas Sowell's 'There are no solutions - only tradeoffs' lately and I think this is likely correct but only a very particular context, ie. low-hanging fruit. Technological progress done right seems to be a buffer against frailty and if we try too hard to optimize without such progress we end up grossly overextended - a great example being how our hyper-optimized globalism, and similarly optimized medical establishment, has been thrashed by Covid which exposed the frailties of such an endeavor. The idea of Dunbars in Proto-B's that Jim has also seems to make a great deal of sense.

In the past year I was also quite positive about Andrew Yang's campaign in the US. For a lot of demographic reasons I figured he couldn't take the nomination but I was at least hoping he'd make a significant impact on what kind of conversation the front-runners had. Similarly, with his idea of UBI, it makes sense that the slack needs to be picked up if we're going to go to a gig economy and depend in any way on the economics of home ownership - ie. precarious job markets make that extremely difficult for anyone to maintain.
I do think that we need to move away from political orthodoxy, and the most unorthodox we get at it, the better. Some concessions might be needed, and for me that meant rooting for Sanders, which is too much to the left for the US electorate, but hardly anything more than a social reformist. I heard Chomsky say, and I agree with him, that Sanders looks only radical because US politics has moved too much to the right in recent years, so the Democratic Party establishment is now what used to be moderate Republicans.

About Weinstein, Schmachtenberger, Rutt and Yang, for what I have seen so far, they seem to fall in the category of tech entrepreneurs turned technocratic utopian theorists. I'm certainly not into GameB theory (BTW, I found a Wiki on this GameB stuff here). It feels too much like starting to think problems from scratch and ignoring a lot of social theory that has been already there for decades. I mean, the political approach certainly needs to be renewed from a tactical perspective, but the diagnosis is already there, as it has always been, for anyone willing to challenge the established orthodoxy: the world is run by a few economic power elites in the hegemonic centers of the industrialized world, doing what's only best for their private greedy interests. Everything else more or less derives from that. Perhaps you can call me an old fashioned GameA, because I don't think they're going to capitulate so easily. When the pressure is on, the violent, virulent response, reveals all the hypocrisy of their talking points. Just look at what they did to Assange, the latest among many. They won't even hide it, the punishment is public for everyone to learn the lesson: don't even dare.
Papus79 wrote: I thought about this a bit last night, especially the last part, and to an extend what I think the deliverable of the above observations might be well stated as: there's a good chance that what people are trying to package as 'evolutionary game theory' is just game theory itself and evolution bears the marks of game theory because it's downstream from game theory. The suggestion that it doesn't seem like there's much space for considerably 'strong' firmware makes most of it culturally mutable. Assuming all of these things the next question might be what minimum thresholds of abundance or opportunity are needed to keep us from falling back on subcortical coding and in turn antisocial or sociopathic behavior in response to environmental queues in that direction.
I think that resorting on subcortical coding and sociopathic behavior is already a sign of our times, or at least that's what culture promotes, being that of course a broad generalization in which we can still spot islands of human virtues flourishing. I like to think that it's a tough battle, but not lost. I don't believe it all simply depends on material abundance, there's plenty of evidence that modern societies, having the highest production and circulation of goods in history, have also produced at best quite mediocre citizens, and at worst, some troglodytes with smartphones.
Papus79 wrote: Part of why people still read Marx as far as I can tell is that many of his critics of capitalism were poignant and especially so at the height of the industrial revolution. Plenty of his criticisms, especially around family and recreation time, are equally fair in a culture where it's getting more common for people to work 60-80 hour weeks for buying power they used to get in 40 to 50 hours per week.
We might even stop reading Marx and focus on the currents events as they are unfolding: still it's crystal clear, capitalism is going through a profound crisis and life conditions for nations that once were among the most privileged, are deteriorating fast. It is taking so many other dimensions besides people feeling exploited at the work place. One looks at the dialogue between Stiglitz and Varoufakis in 2015 here when Varoufakis was still a minister in the Greek government trying, to negotiate with the big powers, and one can't help but easily realize what is at stake, where's the most fundamental problem: democracy, social progress and people's well being run in the opposite direction of the interests of the minority financial elites. And this is before Varoufakis' prime minister capitulated to their demands, despite the vote of his own people. There's another impressive dialogue between Varoufakis and Chomsky some years later and the insights are shocking, not because of subtleties we might suddenly discover in the political game, but because the simple facts hit you brutally in the face.
Papus79 wrote: I think the biggest problem is the heuristics we use right now - ie. right and left is too crude, the version of this map weighing both polls against an axis called 'libertarian vs authoritarian' is at least a bit more useful as 'libertarian' in the open rather than economic sense tends to be conservatives and liberals who can get along much better with each other than their authoritarian counterparts, but I think one of the muddiest areas has to be the idea of 'centrism'. There are probably so many different ways to be centrist with such different outcomes that it almost seems to do more damage not to carve that notion up. Neoliberals would be considered centrist, classic liberals would be considered centrist, many libertarians would be average as centrist, same for many minarchists, and so they may vary considerably on their preference for size of government or what government's roll is. To handle that correctly you'd at least need then three dimensions.
I must agree. Most of these labels (left, right, centre, libertarian, authoritarian, etc.) have become fashionable tags, completely useless for real political action. And that's why they all could be put in the catalogue of reactionary thinking. This is so obvious with the postmodernists: these senseless tribal fights based on identity markers, moving the real social struggles to a domain of symbolic oppression, obscure the real issues. Rebellion is tamed and despite the sectarian divisions, all stays in the surface.
Papus79 wrote: Any particular familiarity with or thoughts on Mark Blyth? I've been listening to him a while, IMHO he's brilliant however it can be a bit hard to follow him into the weeds. He had a couple lectures 'How we got here and why' and 'Can we have it all?' from last year which I thought were particularly informative and especially as he was talking about attempts to rebuild meso-layers of economics as well as figuring out ways to recycle stuck assets. I also got some good insights from these videos on all of the drawbacks of the gold standard and why we got away from it. The worrying thing about MMT though - the tendency to over-leverage seems to make it relatively combustible and then while it's true that government debt is not the same as household debt it still, just intuitively, has to have limits even if they're harder to trace when we're dealing with public and international investor confidence as the limits.
Honestly, I had not heard of him. I looked him up online and seems to be someone worth following. They say he's influenced by Karl Polanyi (and just that makes him interesting enough) and apparently he's pretty much a Keynesian. Keynes, as you might know, fought against the doctrines of austerity of orthodox economists in times of crisis. The Keynesians are back!!
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: Dr. Edward Dutton discussing Planet of the Humans

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Count Lucanor wrote: May 21st, 2020, 6:54 pm About Weinstein, Schmachtenberger, Rutt and Yang, for what I have seen so far, they seem to fall in the category of tech entrepreneurs turned technocratic utopian theorists. I'm certainly not into GameB theory (BTW, I found a Wiki on this GameB stuff here). It feels too much like starting to think problems from scratch and ignoring a lot of social theory that has been already there for decades. I mean, the political approach certainly needs to be renewed from a tactical perspective, but the diagnosis is already there, as it has always been, for anyone willing to challenge the established orthodoxy: the world is run by a few economic power elites in the hegemonic centers of the industrialized world, doing what's only best for their private greedy interests. Everything else more or less derives from that. Perhaps you can call me an old fashioned GameA, because I don't think they're going to capitulate so easily.
I think the main my main areas of agreement with GameB would be as follows - 1) the structures of power that accumulate in capitalism of the GameA type are autopoitic. Certain strategies win, those who win at all costs take the top, and thus the results are baked into the rules and we're learning - at least in more granular detail than in the past (where history was strained, edited, or even rewritten by the victors) - that the ways in which structures interact with humanity's less mutable traits and even the immutable aspects of game theory set us on something of a one-way track toward certain conclusions written into the rules and when the rules are like that (ie. what it takes to win and, ultimately, continue your germ line with some hope for their own future) and the best one can do when confronted with such rules is throw regulations in the way of those conclusions, which can slow it down and keep civil unrest below a certain threshold but that's only staying the ultimate outcomes. 2) The goal of GameB seems, as far as I can tell, to be about leveraging something that GameA threw out the window, ie. the sort of small group cooperation that David Sloan Wilson has been talking about, thinking about seeding it in groups of Dunbar size, and the idea is that cooperative behavior could have superior outcomes to GameA 'devil-take-the-hindmost' behavior, and that as the system is collapsing these units will be what's left standing and where people will go to find competence, honesty, and integrity in business dealings and perhaps will even try adopting GameB values in light of seeing it work where GameA was self-terminating and ended up with most of society essentially redundant, unneeded, and headed toward a place where - under that system - only the most rarified talent and/or their children (which will usually not have that in common with their parents) would have any right to reproduce let alone live.

My biggest concern with GameB is that it might be too little too late. Especially if things really start unraveling within the next five years and a few little villages pop up around the US and Europe with maybe a population of 1,000 in total, it'll just be a bunch of irrelevant fringe weirdos that no one cares about and things will simply move on in the direction they were going to go without them having any influence.

Count Lucanor wrote: May 21st, 2020, 6:54 pmI think that resorting on subcortical coding and sociopathic behavior is already a sign of our times, or at least that's what culture promotes, being that of course a broad generalization in which we can still spot islands of human virtues flourishing. I like to think that it's a tough battle, but not lost. I don't believe it all simply depends on material abundance, there's plenty of evidence that modern societies, having the highest production and circulation of goods in history, have also produced at best quite mediocre citizens, and at worst, some troglodytes with smartphones.
The thing I'm trying to sort out, being on the autistic spectrum so mildly that it doesn't show up in actual social behavior but only in certain things I don't do, just how aggressively everyone looks for any sign of difference - whatsoever - to slap put a huge invisible wall up and project the assumption that if the person's not a serial killer, cannibal or baby-rapist that they eventually will be. I think this is part of why my understanding of this leans so heavily on game theory and Darwinian psychology - it seems like what people are doing and wanting to do has little or anything to do with truth and if anything the obsession seems to be over identifying people who might be best thought of as 'genetic copying errors', measuring them with the most crooked/wavy measuring stick they can find, measuring them shoulder to shoulder with it, and declaring them a midget. To me that's hardly behavior fit for an animal fit for an animal that we'd call 'human', it's something closer to a chimpanzee that can talk, drive, and text.

Where I could potentially see that turning my politics dark if Game B fails or if we're looking at a melee between 'x' supremacist groups, fascists, anarchists, etc. - I could be at least somewhat sympathetic to the idea of some sort of Synarchy (if liberal democracy were ultimately untenable), it's just that I'd really have to see extreme qualitative vetting of the people involved and the most likely reason I'd never go that way - any place where power plays is a magnet for psychopaths. They'd need to have vetting structures and internal punishments for code infraction on the level of the druids of old, and potentially initiations just as caustic, otherwise the gate keeping simply wouldn't be good enough. Anything the slightest bit short of that and some way of salvaging liberal democracy in which cooperative strategies can be salvaged back out of the garbage bin is the only shot we have at a future worth much of anything IMHO.
Count Lucanor wrote: May 21st, 2020, 6:54 pmWe might even stop reading Marx and focus on the currents events as they are unfolding: still it's crystal clear, capitalism is going through a profound crisis and life conditions for nations that once were among the most privileged, are deteriorating fast. It is taking so many other dimensions besides people feeling exploited at the work place. One looks at the dialogue between Stiglitz and Varoufakis in 2015 here when Varoufakis was still a minister in the Greek government trying, to negotiate with the big powers, and one can't help but easily realize what is at stake, where's the most fundamental problem: democracy, social progress and people's well being run in the opposite direction of the interests of the minority financial elites. And this is before Varoufakis' prime minister capitulated to their demands, despite the vote of his own people. There's another impressive dialogue between Varoufakis and Chomsky some years later and the insights are shocking, not because of subtleties we might suddenly discover in the political game, but because the simple facts hit you brutally in the face.
I've liked what I've heard from Varoufakis, however my only complaint is that I haven't been able to pinpoint anything unique that I've heard from him. Some of his chats, for example, with Brian Eno were interesting and I like some of what he's said about the EU but that's about as far as I've gotten with it. i'll have to check out the video you linked and see if that changes my mind.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me
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