OK. Catching up. Just finished chapter 4. Would be willing to do the next, chapter 5. (finally have the time to do it next weekend :) )

Do you disagree with the psychological fact that people emulate those who are perceived as leaders? Really this is a silly game - what do you expect me to do? Quote to you research studies about this finding? If you just open your eyes and look around you, you will see that people do seek to emulate those who are perceived to be leaders - there would be no need for a study — Agustino

Emulate? I certainly question that assertion. Leaders have followers. But what is following? Well, there is no following in the abstract -- one has to attend to a particular situation. In a church? Sure, I'd grant some emulation (though I'd stress *some*, and also the need to attend to particulars -- but it's at least plausible). But in a representative democracy? Hardly. The idea that President Clinton's behavior somehow made "the masses" more accepting than they previously were of adultery is laughable. Especially considering the reaction -- which ranged from scandal to shrugging.

And, yes, research is a good start. It's certainly better than what has thus far been more or less a reference to "common sense" and the perception of what you take to be obvious.

You happen to have a copy of the paper? It's going to cost me $40.

Now let's see if this changes anything - of course it doesn't - because what's happening with you is that you don't want to believe it in the first place, as it is ruinous to your political beliefs. — Agustino

Caught red-handed, Agustino. You clearly have pilloried everything I hold dear and I am just desperately scraping to save my threadbare faith in the Marquis de Sade.

:D

Okay, I disagree with that. It is well known that most people follow their leaders at least to a certain extent and seek to emulate them. — Agustino

Can you demonstrate that? I mean, suppose it were not well known. I obviously don't know it, because I don't believe it.

How do you determine who counts as "most people" and what does it mean to follow a leader? And how does that differ from following a leader "to a certain extent" -- and isn't that actually different from emulation? Is it well known that most people seek to emulate the people they follow?

I think you're taking too much for granted, and oversimplifying how people actually behave. Even (or perhaps, especially -- its more complicated) en masse.

Though I agree that "who cares?", I don't think that the offense of DT was extra-marital sexuality, but his flouting sexual assault just because he happened to have the power to do so while famous.

I think "affect" is a wider term than "encourage" -- I don't think that just because someone in power does something that "the masses" will then be more prone to follow suit. Especially with sex. People like having sex regardless of what the person in power does.

That's true. I remember back in 1998 when I was a wee one sanctimoniously holding to the rod of righteous monogamy after marriage, but when Clinton showed me that I could do so much more -- that, my friend, is when the impure thoughts began to snowball into libertine excesses.

For we can always ask what makes it the case that whatever it is, is what it is. — darthbarracuda

I just want to focus in on this bit of reasoning, because it seems to me that a good deal of your pondering comes about from this simple argument.

Why does it matter that we are able to form a question? It seems to me that we are free to form all manner of questions. But, just as a statement is not true by our ability to form a statement, a question may not have an answer just because we form the question.

So we might say everything is material, and then ask "What makes it the case that material is material?" -- but if this is our foundation, then nothing makes it the case that material is material. Or, if there be no foundations, then we should never expect some sort of self-evident termination to our line of questioning. In either case the former becomes what you end your paragraph with --

when does it stop? — darthbarracuda

Though I might offer a slight modification to "when should we stop?"

It doesn't stop, as you note, because we can always ask a question even if the question has no answer. There will never be a self-evident answer given to your question when we just say to ourselves "And now we can stop"

But we can and perhaps even should stop at some point. Especially if our previous line of argument is something which will offer no terminus (and we happen to desire a terminus)

On the latter point -- that's how I feel. I tend to think that this line of thinking is more a cultural product than anything.

On the former -- yup. It's not just for you, but evolution is about populations and not individuals :D It bottoms out at species, after all -- so even larger than populations, since a species persists over several populations.

I don't know, man. I've only ever seen people arguing over the existence/non existence of altruism use arguments that are riddled with biases and objectively inapplicable. — Weeknd

I'm not sure what you're saying with this. My closest guess is that you're saying that you can only argue about altruism from a subjective viewpoint, and so your argument is not fallacious.

But I'm just using a common standard for pointing out fallacies in informal logic -- by showing how the form of the argument can both support and refute the same conclusion. So, subjective or not, your argument would still be fallacious by that standard.

Hence why I'm not sure what you are saying.

However, in spite of how "ugly" I find the egoist position, I've seen absolutely no good counter arguments, and any example of altruism can be explained away by an egoist as a counter example. This is what forced me into my current position.

Here again --

"However beautiful I find the altruistic position I've seen absolutely no good counter arguments, and any example of egotism can be explaiend away by an altruist as a counter example. This is what forced me into my current position"

You're basically just shifting the burden of proof to the other side of the argument.

IMO a good reason for the illusion of altruism is the innate human desire for socialization and companionship, which were most definitely necessary for survival as well as satisfaction earlier but arguably are somewhat less necessary nowadays, so we now "see", due to self reliance and isolationism, that what we used to call altruism were just means of fulfillment of one's own desires, securities and moral contentment — Weeknd

A good reason for the illusion of egotism is that people perform acts of altruism. ;) But if you discount the counter-example then you won't perceive them.

I think this is a confused bundle, in truth though. For one, you're assuming that our desires today are the same as what they were, and that our desires today are related to the desires of some unknown biological past as well as to our ability to survive as a species.

But even for traits which are straightforwardly understood to be biological, such as hair color, don't fit this model. Not every trait that an individual animal has is even related to evolution, and traits which a species have are often vestigial or simply "tag-along" with other traits that were selected for.

Then what is this "we now see"? What is self reliance and isolationism that makes us see?

I would say these latter are more related to society than either psychology (desire) or biology (reproduction).

3. Even though we see acts of altruism and sacrifice, one can argue that it's ultimately for one's own contentment/ satisfaction or ego. They're still doing these things for their own self, in a way. So I'd say psychological egoism is trivially true . Note that this tendency does NOT imply all acts of kindness are worthless. — Weeknd

I think this is a fallacious form of reasoning. I say that it's fallacious because when you perform the same sort of argument, but for opposing conclusions, it works just as well.

Consider:

"even though we are self-interested and seek pleasure and avoid pain for ourselves, one can argue that it's ultimately for altruistic motives. They are still doing these things for the good of the species, in a way. So I'd say that psychological altruism is trivially true. Note that this tendency does NOT imply that all acts of selfishness are praiseworthy"

Where is the argument in there? Aren't you just restating the case throughout by reinterpreting the counter-example as, at bottom, in support of your idea?

8. From (7), it follows that organisms have had this tendency to pursue pleasurable activities and minimise pain even before these activities gave them evolutionary advantages. — Weeknd

I don't think this follows from 7. I would say that you're adding a dimension of time, for one, and that activities were pleasurable prior to them influencing fitness, for two. While it is true that pleasure does not lead to evolutionary fitness, per se, and that those individuals who pursue self-interest along the lines of pleasure will seek out pleasure regardless of its impact on the species ability to survive, that does not then imply that the activities which we find pleasurable now -- and lets say, for the sake of argument, that these activities now do contribute to evolutionary fitness -- were activities which contributed to evolutionary fitness prior to them being pleasurable.

One could see, in light of the belief that our psychologies are a product of our biology, the belief following that as soon as an activity makes the species evolutionarily fit then our psychologies will follow along and make said activity pleasurable.



I'd note here that I don't believe biology implies psychology. There's an influence, but the inference from biological fact to psychological fact is a poor one in all the cases I've seen so far.

I tend to think along with Levinas, in this respect. While the problem of other minds wasn't his focus, if you accept that philosophy begins with the face-to-face encounter, then there just isn't really much of a question of other minds in the sense that we might wonder if this human is human like I am human. In the first respect, there is no question of their humanity, and in the second, you don't have access to the Other -- the Other is always other. There is no deduction that will prove some other's humanity is the same as yours, but you don't need it to be in order for you to recognize their humanity due to your encounter with the face-to-face.

Intersubjectivity is a curious beast to a particular line of thinking. But what I'm trying to get at here is that it's this line of thinking which is more fruitful to suspend and question -- the thinking where:

"

Mustn’t logical concepts be isomorphic to the structure of empirical observations to have sense and use value? — sime

is a question which makes sense to ask.

It's an understandable sentiment, and no you're not bringing me down. I do that to myself enough already :P :D.

I still wouldn't defend utopianism myself. I don't consider my way of approaching politics utopian. But it was interesting to see a defense that seemed reasonable to me.

Then you simply fail to see a key element of capitalism and why it's preferable over other systems. Financial incentivization is very effective. Robots are being created to do more work not to give humans an easier life, but to make the builders of them more wealthy. — Hanover

I think you overstate your own knowledge of human motivation, here. Financial incentivization is very effective at motivating people, I won't deny. But it's not really effective at motivating people to be innovative in the sense of novelty. People are already creative. There is pleasure in creativity.

What it is effective at is dulling people's sympathy, or assuaging people's pain.

I'm not suggesting that labor is not sacred, Puritan work ethic and all. What I'm saying is that your comment that labor is not sacred is a meaningless concept when uttered by you because you don't hold anything to be sacred. If I'm incorrect here, then give me a specific example of what you hold to be sacred. — Hanover

The working class. ;)

Art, knowledge, relationships with people, human needs, love, compassion. These aren't things that are up for negotiation. No argument could persuade me that these are not valuable. They are beyond reproach -- like God.

Though, I'd wager that "sacred" is not meaningless as a concept regardless if I am a sacrilegious person in general. In fact, if I hold nothing to be sacred, then it would follow, logically, that labor is included in that, as a part of everything.


As to the rest -- uh, it's like denying there's a computer I'm writing on. OK, cool.

It's handled efficiently as is evidenced by the never ending innovation and increased productivity. In fact, it is this very system that is producing the robots that you believe will lead to our salvation, yet for some reason you condemn it — Hanover

I don't see innovation as a feature of capitalism. People innovate regardless of the private ownership over the workplace.

You're speaking gibberish. The term "sacred" means nothing to you. It's a hollow concept that fools insert into sentences to create meaning where there is none. Unless you can tell me what is sacred, it seems a waste for me to explain why labor might be sacred. — Hanover

You have an odd habit of telling me what I believe.

Sacred is deserving of religious veneration. It's not so hard to draw out that labor is considered sacred when it is both part of existence and created by God. Did you not bring in the allusion of the Garden of Eden?

I don't think I'm being unfair in using the word. You'd be far from alone in thinking that labor is sacred.

These leisurely folks work much longer hours than the guys on the assembly line — Hanover

Perhaps when we consider white men living in the United States within unionized jobs with unions which are strong that is the case.

But even in the U.S. that's quite false. The 80 hour work week is far from unknown to the working class. The compensation which these people who somehow consider chairing meetings and delegating tasks as work, however, is quite unknown.

Our thirst for more things doesn't end when one task is completed, but we produce more things. — Hanover

Here we might have some agreement, actually. But I don't think that the unboundedness of human desire explains why people would work themselves to death.

And I've seen things that don't suck. That is to say, I'm dismissive of your anecdotes. — Hanover

I'd say that there is no science of this stuff. People try, but inevitably the metrics are just ways of restating the assumptions and positions which are based on anecdotes anyways, but hiding that fact.

Experience is not measurable in the same way mass is. But I assure you that my anecdotes are far from singular. You may not believe me, or find them to be of minor consequence from your experiences -- but dismissal is the sin I've been calling out this entire time, no?

To be frank I think the word 'capitalism' has become too broad a word to be as useful as it was. It disguises tremendous differences in institutional arrangements because they all superficially share certain features.

I realise these are rather stray observations. Broadly the ideas feel to me like an extrapolation from what seem like existing trends which I doubt will continue (nor, sadly, do I agree with swstephe that 'capitalism' or business/finance is weakening). Some of them were 60s dreams too - the reduced working week, cleaner work - and events did not fulfil those dreams. — mcdoodle

Whoops! missed that. haha.

Perhaps so. I still use it, though, because I don't have any other words to describe the social relationship which results in x, y, and z -- as detailed by Karl Marx. (Though I am not Marxist, his critical project is pretty spot on and useful for understanding power relations at work). The particulars -- or, to use Marx's term, the "concrete conditions" -- will differ considerably, and are important to any actual project. But the social relationship bears a causal property that explains power at work.

Your final point is something that I do think the book addresses, too -- they are trying to revive this notion of utopia and dreams because they feel they should continue, that they give something to work towards and push for. That's why they named the book "Inventing the Future": the left's home is in the future, and in painting a better future (according to them).

Heck, some of these dreams go back to the dawn of the labor movement at the birth of widespread industrial capital. Peasants were forced off of lands and proletarianized by the fact that they owned nothing but their labor, and could survive only by selling their labor which gave owners coercive power over their lives by being able to say who gets to eat and who doesn't. Hence the demand for the reduced working week without a loss of pay. So even though 60's dreamers may have participated in that tradition, I'd be hesitant to accept that designation because generally people think it means "impossible" -- when the fight for a shorter working week has actually been won before (and since gone in decline) by people fighting for those very dreams.

Thanks for outlining the thesis, Moliere. My own response to how things are as I age has been to shift to a perspective which I know is a minority view - the Green, ecological view - which I've concluded is where I am most intellectually content. Out here on a limb :) But I think I spent many years slipping into mainstream thinking while kidding myself that I was persuading people out of the mainstream. — mcdoodle

Heh. I am discontent with it, but I still spend more time on the limb.

On this limb the medium-term looks like that economically most countries will have to adjust from fossil-fuel energy to renewable energy, and that there will be considerable conflict over basic resources, including water, with wars including civil wars a likely continuing consequence. Meanwhile a belief in the rightness of inequality of reward seems embedded in Western thinking, more embedded than it was fifty years ago when I was Hanover's teenage dreamer. In that 50-year period class-based unions have weakened considerably, though gender/race-based organisations have grown much stronger. But coalitions of identity-politics-believers seem flimsy to me.

My worry about the agenda proposed is that it doesn't seem to be taking these very considerable issues into account. Automation is energy- and resource-hungry: is it really inevitable that it will grow and grow? I think it will recede when energy costs become too great, or workers begin to demand the right to work, or the powerful begin to demand that the proleteriat works in return for its basic income. (I am a strong advocate of the universal basic income, and don't think it's necessarily a capitalistic adjustment as swsteph does) — mcdoodle

I agree with you that the particular outline doesn't address environmental issues (ones which I also agree with you are important). My thought on that is that a socialism is better suited to handle environmental problems than a capitalism is. When you have privately owned firms the most you can do is either regulate and enforce (and that last part is often lacking), or make ecological choices through the market -- which still allows firms to produce non-ecologically.

But if you have social control over the economy then people can argue over what should be produced and not produced, and the ecological problem is one that's very important to people with few means (after all, the such-and-such part per million oil:water will be cheaper than the purified water of the future. Similar things will hold for all manner of ecological damage -- the rich will buy their way out of any problem, while the rest of us get to live with higher cancer rates.)

It's in this way that I tend to see labor and green politics as having similar interests, though it's hard to tell the leaders of these respective positions that -- who historically have been at odds, and whose leaders seem content on continuing that conflict.


I see UBI as an adjustment because private ownership over firms would still be in place, and people would still work for a wage -- people desire more than food on the table and a place to live, so they'd easily be persuaded to work, as long as the conditions were right, and there would still be bosses and owners in place. The working class would just have an easier time in-between jobs is all.

The derail is fine :).

But. . . I mean, I just don't agree I guess. Socialism is an economic system where workplaces are publicly owned rather than privately owned. So just because you didn't have to buy something at work that doesn't mean that it's socialist. The workplace is a privately owned entity, where the rules are written and enforced by those who own it (or delegate that out to managers, as is often the case).

Caring is important, I wouldn't disagree. But the household is more of a benevolent dictatorship -- which some believe is how socialism must run, but I don't think that's true. It doesn't seem to me to be set in stone.

So though we might choose to share, and not turn a profit with every individual action we take, or view school (and push for schools) which are more than jobs training, I don't see any of that as taking away from the capitalist project where there are owners who write the rules, and workers who follow them.

This is why it seems to me that you are just being dismissive -- didn't I just agree with you that robots cannot entirely replace work?

Yet, though labor is part of human existence, how it is organized is indeed coercive because of how ownership is handled. Further, that it is part of existence differs from thinking that labor is somehow sacred -- which it is not. Another basic fact, from the perspective of a working class, is that work sucks. You can make peace with it, but it sucks all the same.

As you note, though, the work week has not shortened (it has actually re-lengthened). What's more, exploitative conditions like that found in 1800's have been exported to other countries. And there is a leisure class of owners responsible for these decisions -- yet you call that a diatribe.

These are just facts. The most obvious conclusion to draw from those facts, from my perspective, is that the problem is not technology, but rather the political power of labor. Automation has not resulted in more free time, but rather a reduction in well-payed jobs and an increase in efficiency of production. If the job gets done faster, yet we have no more leisure, what reason would you attribute to that?


That is not a diatribe, a pre-pubescent fantasy, an infantile yearning. It's a desire to not suffer. I've known people who have been worked so hard they are disabled to provide stupid services for entitled rich people. I've seen bosses use their authority to inflict all manner of cruelties that they were able, through their power over access to basic goods (like food and housing) which forces people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do (such as put up with abuse, such as work until they are disabled, such as take drugs to stay awake for three jobs to have enough money for children). These are facts, not propaganda. And the adult position is to care about suffering, and do something about it, rather than dismiss it as the responsibility of lazy, pubescent, ignorant, deluded etc. etc. implications that you seem to draw.

Well, first off, my point was that what you envision is some sort of teenager utopia where you reap all the benefits of labor without having to do anything. Simply replace your "full automation" premise with a money tree, a rich parent, a sugar daddy, or someone else's tax dollars and you'll arrive at the same conclusion. You're trying to eliminate the "labor" from the labor force. — Hanover

The desire to be free isn't a teenage utopia.

Labor isn't something to enshrine from now to forevermore. I rather doubt that robots can entirely replace work, but that was addressed before in previous exchanges with others -- it doesn't need to entirely replace labor in order to have an effect.

Further, the entitled ones in the world we live in now don't even work. Rather, they convince laborers to work for them through coercion.

If someone makes robots that can do everything, obviously someone has to design them, build them, operate them, and maintain them. What this does is actually the opposite of what you want. It rids our need for low level workers and the wealth flows to those more highly skilled workers who can operate the robots. Any effort to redistribute the wealth down to those who've been made obsolete will land us right back where we are today: a disproportionate amount of the wealth will be both created and controlled by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. — Hanover

This counter-argument is addressed by the conjunction of demands.

That is to say, technology isn't kind to those whose contribution is brute force. Sure, they can lift the boxes of the robots and put them on the floor, but we've got fork lifts that can do that too. — Hanover

Seems to me that owners are the unkind ones, since they have some kind of agency -- whereas robots and technology do not.

A thought I've been favoring of late is that philosophy is the attempt to lessen human stupidity in all its forms. Since human stupidity is pervasive -- excluding no one person -- we see philosophy addressing it in many various topics. And in the usual history given in western philosophy we see that it was born not of wonder as much as a cure to superstition, to unjust political systems, to a lack of scientific knowledge, to a lack of an understanding of our human souls. . . (or, at least, these are particular ways of interpreting the ancients within this mold)

So it's not entirely unfair to characterize philosophy in this manner, either.

The consequent of this idea would be that philosophy's subject matter is actual human stupidity.

I've oscillated on that question a lot. There's a relationship of some kind, because whatever we call mind influences the body and whatever we call the body influences the mind, but I don't know what that relationship is.

But, with respect to knowledge, I'd say that knowledge is situation outside of an individual mind-body, and that mind is separate from knowledge -- I'd situation knowledge socially rather than mind-centrically. (just noting this bc of the previous question. Not sure if that's what you were after, but I thought it worth mentioning)

If you added up all the positive and negative effects, do you end up with a net positive outcome? — swstephe

That would depend on who you ask and what you want, no? I don't think there would be some kind of measure -- I'd say that we argue over what the measuring tool is, not on the calculations.

If so, was that positive outcome based on some other economic pressure? I have found in other movements, if you get past the problem and focus on the solution, you end up trying to figure out how is it going to pay for itself.

I'd say that it's easy enough to say that, yes, it was based on some other economic pressure because that's how economies work -- the buggaboo of much economic thinking is ceteris perebus. But when you look at economies not as physical systems but as historical systems it's easier to suss out how things might work in conjunction, and gives a guide to how you might proceed differently from those before you.

I'm looking at the problem as an engineer. There is a kind of conservation of motion even at economic and social levels. There are liberals because there are conservatives, they balance each other out. Automation has to balance with the opposite of automation, which would probably be alienation and dehumanization. It has happened many times through human history, and there is always some pressure to reclaim what was lost. — swstephe

Eh, I guess we don't share these beliefs. I don't think that political or economic systems behave in a manner commensurate to a conservation law, or that people on the spectrum balance one another out, or that one particular idea must be balanced out by another idea.

There's opposition to political movements in history. I agree there. But I don't see how sides balance one another out or how those who disagree rely on one another.

sd

I took some personal time off to address this kind of question. I realized that not only is post-capitalist society possible, (every society was pre-capitalist at some point), but we spend a minority of our time being capitalists. If you remove the time at work or shopping, you spend a lot of time in what is essentially a socialist household. The "state" provides services, works and nothing depends on real exchange of money. Capitalism is already shrinking. More services and social interchange are becoming less capitalist every year. — swstephe

I believe post-capitalism is a possibility, I just don't know. (where post-capitalism is understood to be not a return to pre-capitalist origins, but to something different from capitalism yet still modern). ((worth noting here that I'm uncertain that the usual examples actually accomplished their end-goal, too. Merely uncertain, though))

Also, I disagree that the household is socialist, or that capitalism is shrinking.

The household is based on private property, for one, though house-hold level private property is something usually thought to be part of a socialist vision. But even more than this, capitalism permeates the household by inculcating people to values which benefit capitalists -- such as the work ethic. You teach your children to do well in school, be industrious, and obey authority because we live in a society where such behavior is rewarded (especially if you are white, especially if you are straight, especially if you are male, etc. etc. ) -- that isn't to speak against these as values, mind. But they are the values which benefit capitalists, at this moment. ((though, personally, I don't agree with authoritarian values, I'm just noting here that i'm being descriptive of how capitalism is part of the household, and not holding this or that value as an obvious thing to discard -- that would take a different argument))

The household, living within a broader capitalist context, does not escape capitalism. Its goods are predicated upon participating in that larger economic system.You can't just ignore work and consumption. That's like saying if you just ignore capitalism then capitalism isn't there. But these are the primary ways the majority of us participate in the system of capitalism (of course it's a given that few of us spend time being capitalists -- the system is built on the notion that most work for few).

To say capitalism is shrinking: what? The private ownership over the workplace -- which includes so-called "publicly" traded companies -- is not in decline, nor is the subsequent result of an owning class and a working class. I don't know how you arrived at that belief, but I have a notion that the metric you're using to classify capitalism might be where we are at odds there. Capitalism is the private ownership over the workplace, where the workplace is treated as property of some owner or another (whether that owner be the manager, or that owner be a group of people who bought shares of a company with the understanding that it would be managed by a board and host of officers to make good on that promise)


I'd note here that capitalism is indeed a worldwide phenomenon, too -- cheap labor and hyper-exploitation are necessary features of allowing some people within the world enough time and energy to participate in volunteer projects such as linux and wikipedia, insofar that such an economy is organized along capitalist lines (cheap labor being preferable to more expensive machines, when you pay them little enough or just enough to create children that can then be re-exploited). I believe that working class people in the U.S. have it hard -- it's a struggle, and it's not fair to them. But capitalism gets worse within the prisons, and within countries outside of the U.S. We can't just focus on the living standards of a handful of countries. You have to look at what capitalism does across the globe, and many of the symptoms of capital which Marx describes occurring in England in the late 1800's are just recreated elsewhere when people finally push back against those conditions -- which is possible because we treat workplaces as private entities which the owners have say over what will be done with them.

A boring answer, but my thought is that Kant pretty much wrote the book on that particular distinction -- "Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.", where intuitions can be understood to take up the empirical side of the question of knowledge.

I would say that it's unreasonable, even, to favor one side over the other. Neither can stand in substitution or even in superiority to the other -- as far as (scientific) knowledge is concerned, they are interdependent.

One point from the video that I thought was good to make was that automation is not inevitable -- as we see now, there is extreme exploitation by use of cheap manual labor because machines would actually cost more. After a country industrializes, capital will then move to places where industry costs less.

Also, the demand puts into perspective the need for a global orientation to labor politics.

You're just being dismissive. Do you have a reason why it wouldn't work?

First, I am a bit put off when someone starts out talking about problems. — swstephe

But what if there are problems and people do not see those problems? I believe this is why he begins -- because people don't see it as a problem, so they have no reason to look at the solution. So he's making the case, here, for why the rest of his argument should be paid attention to.

I suppose you could just skip that part, though, if you're already interested.

Second, I'm wary of someone who falls back to hand-waving or vague pronouncements about how there is some technological solution to the problem. Every technology has trade-offs. — swstephe

I don't think it's quite hand-waving. It's not just "well, technology will take care of it" -- but automation has already had a large effect on the economy, and automation is already something which companies are pushing for. Automation is here, and it cuts into the number of jobs that are available (has already cut into jobs that are available). (He goes over this at minute 21 of the video -- still listening, but he starts to cover the topic there)

Whether full automation is a real possibility, I'd say there's still a point because automation has already had effects on employment, and there's no good reason to think that companies are going to somehow avoid automation when they can implement it and it costs less (isn't that the proverbial threat we hear when fast food workers organize? That they'll be replaced by machines?)

Third, currently, technology, economy and society are all tightly integrated — swstephe

I'm not following how this speaks against the authors. I would say that you and the authors are in full agreement on this statement.

In capitalist economies, money has become objectified values, so technology is our need/desires objectified. If we ever managed to automate everything, then we would no longer be relevant to the economic equation. Even political spectrum, "conservative" and "liberal" are balance each other, simplifying the negative and positive emotions of the population. — swstephe

Could you spell this out? I don't know what you're getting at here.

Reduction of work week. Well, that is a minor economic tool to fine-tune consumerism and capitalism at the lower levels. Is it even relevant in a "post-capitalist" society? There is an assumption that we will still work and won't like it. In such a big economic and social shift, that assumption may no longer be true. — swstephe

Not in a post-capitalist society, but a demand that makes sense right now in our concrete conditions. Is a post-capitalist society even possible? I don't know, but I know that what we have isn't working, and that our relationship to work is a part of that.

Basic income is nice, but it is another capitalist adjustment, and it has an obligatory part of inflation which keeps invalidating what is considered "basic". So you need to put a bunch of other controls in place, like price fixing for essential assets or forced restriction on what is considered a "need". If you need to do that, then start with that.

Sure, UBI is not luxurious techno-communism. It's a demand that makes sense today. You would be fighting similar fights as you do now with the minimum wage, but that's not to speak against the idea. Of course adjustments will need to be made. There is no solution which is just going to take care of itself -- history doesn't end.

OK cool. Sounds good.

haha. I was reading it as a reply, and so was kind of confused.

I don't think Apple, Google, McDonalds, and Uber have our best interests in mind, or that automation is a panacea. Nor do the authors. I'm not sure how I gave that impression at all.

Even if work sucks, that doesn't mean that having no work will be better. Even the suckyest work place is likely the source of many people's vital social relationships. It's often the very suckyness of work that has bound people together. — Bitter Crank

That's actually addressed too, in the section aptly titled "The Misery of Not Being Exploited"

It would definitely take a political project to make automation not-suck, as we have already seen with the effects of automation on the lives of working people. It's whose in control, though, and not automation itself which makes that bad for the working class.

They defend their project as a utopian project, actually. These demands are just the concrete, minimal-project that they envision for a proper 21'st century left. It was interesting to read their defense of utopian aims, to say the least (which isn't to say I agree with them, either -- but its not usual for people to defend utopianism).

I liked it because I've sort of felt in a rut in my political thinking, and both their critiques of some popular beliefs (which they term "folk politics") and the positive project they outline seemed both fruitful and agreeable.

That isn't to say that I endorse everything they have to say. In reading that manifesto I'm not surprised that they are accelerationists, and that actually was one of my concerns with their project.

But what it offered was something fresh, and positive. Not that anything they say is necessarily unique or even original, but it was a good exposition of these ideas from the perspective of the modern left in the U.S. and Europe, and why it should be important to a 21'st century left. So, rather than going into the ins and outs of various historical periods (not that this isn't valuable, but there's more to politics than its history, no?), it just tackled the 21'st century head-on, and did so in a direct manner that was easy to read.


Roughly the book is divided up into a critique portion and a positive project portion, followed by some concluding remarks on the pragmatic side of things. The critique is mainly of current leftist movements' beliefs -- pre-figuration, immediacy, and our relationship to both demands and the future are the main targets. Occupy Wall Street is a good example of the target they have in mind, though there are others as well.

But unlike most critiques of OWS, this book is more sympathetic. Not that they agree! Far from. But it's not dismissive, and the writers clearly understand what they are criticizing. So that, unto itself, was nice to read. (It's not that I thought OWS was perfect, but I certainly wasn't interested in criticisms from, say, an advocate of current representational democracy)

So it's like they both take the left to task, but are also sympathetic to and desire the goals of leftist politics. So it served as a good kind of mental floss.



There positive project can be boiled down (and they are the ones who do this outline) to 4 demands:

1. Full automation (meaning, robots do a lot of work)
2. The reduction of the working week
3. The provision of a basic income
4. The diminishment of the work ethic.

The only one of the demands that gives me pause is 1 -- not because work is good, but because I know that automation, in the hands of neo-liberalism, means loss of jobs. It smacks of eggs and omelet thinking. But, it goes nicely hand-in-hand with the last three, where the first creates the conditions to make the next two possible (without a reduction in material wealth), and those three would only be possible if the fourth were actually accomplished (as you note @Bitter Crank -- people do find meaning in work these days)

The chapter goes into detail on these four demands and why they are important to a radical politics sympathetic to socialism (broadly construed -- not necessarily "Socialism is everything the USSR did" but Socialism as a set of values and the collective ownership over the economy).

I am inclined to say there are different sorts of truth, but only because the expression "sorts of truth" makes sense. People say the phrase and I understand what they mean.

In the same way "objective truth" is meaningful. I usually get the gist of what someone means when they use the term.

Merely at the level of meaning, then, yes I can go with both phrases. I don't consider them as somehow forbidden to speak of -- but I would note that it could become very easy to get tripped up on this kind of vernacular when we might ask after a more rigorous expression of truth or objectivity.

I don't know what fine art does for me. I only know that I'm drawn to it.

Art is something of a basic category. It need not do anything for me to be pursued -- so I may walk away from an exhibit thinking that the exhibit was neither technically good nor personally evocative, but said time was not wasted all the same. It may have done nothing for me, but it was good to go all the same.


I'd also note that I'm rather uncertain of the distinction between fine art and art, simpliciter. I know what fits into the category, but I do not generally like what the distinction is supposed to mark -- namely, that art which should be given more respect vs. the lesser "folk" arts. That isn't to say there are not better or worse art, but I would not draw that distinction at the level of kinds, but only the particular art of work itself.

Another meaning of the question is to ask after the necessary and sufficient conditions which an entity possesses. So we might reflect that a bird can have accidental properties such as redness or whiteness, but that because a bird can remain a bird while being either red or white we would not include either redness or whiteness as a necessary or sufficient condition for calling some entity a bird.

So, using this meaning, the question "What is the nature of truth?" is to ask what are the necessary and sufficient conditions by which we may consider an entity the truth?

So I'd like to settle on a translation, if that's OK. I've tried to not before and it was pretty distracting. Are other folk OK with choosing one or the other for sure?

I don't have an excellent background, either. Hence why I'm saying that diving in is probably the best path to knowledge -- I know basics, and I know what I believe, and I know why I believe, but I'm not an educator on the topic.

I'd half-agree. Where I would disagree is in your use of the word "nothing more" That some people indulge in a sort of status game is undeniable. That it is "nothing more than" a game of status is easily refutable, though, at least insofar that real political gains, such as the passage of legislation or changing of policies in the workplace or changing the role of a particular class of people within society at large, count as something other than the game for social status. I would say that any of those three categories would be real political gains, and are very different from simply trying to put oneself on some kind of pecking order within a group -- those sorts of gains make differences for everyone within the class, even if they don't participate.

Of those two I'd opt for Derrida.

I'd be interested in joining in. Of those listed I'd be down, though I think I'd chime in a favorable opinion of "Doing Things with Words"

I feel like most work is a waste of time, were it not for the social caveat that this is how I get a roof over my head and food on the table.

That was an awesome read :D.

She really nails (translations of) Aristotle's writing style.

It was a gray morning, temperate, when Dennett had finished reading his third published essay. He had so looked forward to this quarter's Nous, but after the first article he knew that the only pen worth making notes with now was filled with red ink.

But even the sick pleasure of grading academics could no longer fulfill.

Sighing he looked above his mantle here the crown of philosophy sat, softly illuminated by a Fresnel placed carefully to highlight the fine etchings without drowning the crown out in contrast.

"Wherefore is thy next bearer, I ponder" sighed the old man. "Is no one serious anymore? Am I doomed to be alone in my wisdom, to take it to the grave as only fops and nincompoops take the reigns?"


:D

It strikes me as goofy. It honestly reminds me of my old "mentor" in the union world -- crusty old bitter bastards will continue to be crusty old bitter bastards, and the best contribution they give to the world is a warning to the rest of us to figure out how to avoid living like that.

Dennett's still a great philosopher and all. But he's also human, and I'd put this one in the 2nd camp at first blush. That scholars today should get off your la. . . I mean, find topics of "interest" just seems like an inane point to make.