Re: Grand Theft Auto IV Complete Edition-PROPHET CODEX
Vida Hubbert
Mistake theorists view debate as essential. We all bring different forms of expertise to the table, and once we all understand the whole situation, we can use wisdom-of-crowds to converge on the treatment plan that best fits the need of our mutual patient, the State. Who wins on any particular issue is less important creating an environment where truth can generally prevail over the long term.
Mistake theorists think you can save the world by increasing intelligence. You make technocrats smart enough to determine the best policy. You make politicians smart enough to choose the right technocrats and implement their advice effectively. And you make voters smart enough to recognize the smartest politicians and sweep them into office.
Conflict theorists think you can save the world by increasing passion. The rich and powerful win because they already work together effectively; the poor and powerless will win only once they unite and stand up for themselves. You want activists tirelessly informing everybody of the important causes that they need to fight for. You want community organizers forming labor unions or youth groups. You want protesters ready on short notice whenever the enemy tries to pull a fast one. And you want voters show up every time, and who know which candidates are really fighting for the people vs. just astroturfed shills.
I particularly like this example because the Nazis did not just happen upon the right answer. They had already decided that they did not like smoking and wanted to stamp it out based on reasons that were, at least in some ways, selfish. Then, because of this, they went on fishing expeditions looking for ways tobacco is bad. This is not seeking for the truth; had they found that tobacco is good for you, the research would not have been published.
Germans most likely failed to make an atom bomb because they decided to use heavy water moderators instead of graphite moderators. The ideological explanation is a myth. There were some good reasons for this decision a priori but it completely derailed them.
More even than this. If rationality is systematized winning, then we should expect winners to be more rational. We should expect the ideas of those with a track record of success to be more predictive of reality than those with a track record of failure. In a conflict of the Rich and Elite versus the Poor Masses, we should expect the masses to have less insight into the fact of the matter.
Someone who successfully pulls off a predatory scheme should, all things being equal, be expected to have a more accurate map of the world than someone who fails to pull off a similarly predatory scheme.
It is only by believing that one side of a debate is systematically more predatory that one can conclude that the more powerful and wealthy side is no more likely to have accurate beliefs. This is, of course, what the typical conflict theorist thinks, but the system of inferences is clearly circular.
If rationality is systematized winning, then we should expect winners to be more rational. We should expect the ideas of those with a track record of success to be more predictive of reality than those with a track record of failure. In a conflict of the Rich and Elite versus the Poor Masses, we should expect the masses to have less insight into the fact of the matter.
An even better example would be nuclear winter. As I interpret that, it was a PR project with scientific cover, a conclusion announced with great fanfare before the relevant scientific papers had been published, hence well before there had been an opportunity for them to be critiqued.
That problem can be reduced by international agreements, but there are a lot of countries and it is in the interest of each, if it can, to free ride on the efforts of others. So that makes it a problem which would be easier to solve if there were a one world government.
And further: a Marxist would say that the conflict between classes is a *structural* product of material conditions. Capitalists do not need to be bad people with bad intentions for them to be in class conflict with workers. A capitalist may sincerely believe capitalist ideology, and believe that everything they do is for the good of humanity. This belief is a *mistake*.
In reality, we have interest groups with conflicts based on their interests, and conflicts on values that often split along culture-war lines, and also genuine disagreements about what policies would be best for reaching our shared goals.
It seems like every attempt to engage with Marxists on the serious questions of making governments operate well ends up being a circular intellectual retreat. Other explanations (in this reply-thread) point in this same direction:
what if the leftists are right, and the supposed experts are biased and corrupt, and the ostensibly technical arguments for leftist-disfavored solutions are really just cover for seizing a bigger piece of the pie
I think paying attention to what the conflict theorists of the right are saying is important to understand what is going on in the world. In addition to declaring that Democrats want more Democratic voters, they also believe that Democrats and moderate Republicans favor immigration because they want low-skilled labor for their fat corporate donors.
Then the leftist Conflict Theorists should be able to capture most of the Mistake Theorists with a slam-dunk argument showing where the mistakes are in the technical arguments being deployed against them.
I strongly suspect you do not understand what semiautomatic means in this context. But if you think you do, please explain what it is about semiautomatic weapons that you think makes banning a high priority.
This third license is the one that I cannot guarantee will be honored by all the other States in the Union. Each State that does honor the license has their own welter of laws that apply to how/when/where I can use the License to legally carry a firearm.
I find laws banning guns at bars (or sporting centers, or shopping malls) to be insane. Unless the people who support those laws are also willing to support metal-detectors-plus-law-enforcement at every such building.
On an emotional level, the idea of giving the government an excuse to do to the Internet what the did to the Fourth Amendment still makes me break out in hives- but my estimate for how likely this is was heavily influenced by the technical feasibility of 3-D guns, so it should be much lower now.
There are very, very rich people in this country on all colors of the political spectrum who feel very passionate about issues, or know a lot about them, or maybe just want to get richer off them, or maybe their angry at their mothers for not loving them enough and want to destroy the world over it. Whatever, but they and their money are part of the process too.
How does this solve the problem of rational ignorance? The public good problem in political action that leads to legislation designed to transfer from dispersed to concentrated interest groups even if the net effect is negative?
How are you going to get around strategic voting? If you have two candidates, the rational move is to score your prefered candidate at 100% and their opponent at 0. This is less of a problem with more candidates, but remains an issue.
Under that definition, Scott would exclude a lot of people that the colloquial definition people would definitely say are racist (see part IV). And at least in certain parts of the internet that type of definition is gaining ground. It basically holds that almost no one is racist and indeed that it is pretty close to a meaningless slur that ought to be retired.
Also see the posts on Status 451 about what right-wingers need to learn from the left (tl;dr: having power is more important than convincing people that your ideas are correct): -book-club-what-righties-can-do/
In this case, the only inciting factor to decreasing overall happiness is when PC gets pregnant. As such, rational actors from both camps could realize that their net happiness is increased if they minimize the number of times that PC gets pregnant. Therefore a non-zero sum solution would be to try and reduce the number of times that happens (via sex ed, access to contraceptives, etc)
The closest thing to non-zero-sum policies I can think of is that if both sides agree that unwanted pregnancies are bad regardless of what happens to them, maybe they can both agree on trying to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies.
If the people with whom you are having a a discussion about some intractable difficult problem *consistently* have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to follow through with their agreements, is that zero social trust, negative social trust, or do I fundamentally misunderstand the word?
The knives have been out for a good hundred years at least. I do feel there was a marked shift towards conflict theory in 2014-2016, but I hope it will turn out to be temporary. That is not to say that conflict theory is wrong, but it would be bad if it became dominant.
You mean we have had a hundred years of conflict theory, or left-driven conflict theory. Scott nods towards right-driven conflict theory as well. The original reactionaries had a theory that the populace should be prevented from overturning the established order.
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