On 1/10/14, 10:45 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
I guess I don't follow.
One can always deconstruct to the point that whatever we hold dear is
arbitrary.
That's an exercise many people don't seem to do, for whatever reason.
Maybe they find it upsetting.
The left draws from one set of premises, and the right draws from
another set. A slowly-growing set of sets.
For given pairs of individuals on the left and right, the intersection
of their respective draws can be empty.
Some of those premises can be informed by biology and the social
sciences, others are preferences are just opinions like whether human
life is sacred, and whether one generation should care at all about
those that follow.
To be systematic about this thinking, make a simulation. Take some
initial condition (a population with a distribution of wealth,
connectivity of social networks, etc.) plug-in the premises as actions
for a population of agents and iterate, moving money around, creating
and losing friends, etc. Now take the same initial condition, plug-in
the alternative premises, iterate the agents' decisions, and you'll get
another outcome. Make them fight and contend over premises (as occurs
in real life) and something else will happen in a virtual world. But is
it about the journey or the destination? Do we care about the kind of
decisions the agents get to make or what happens to them? If the
agents are happily making decisions that they like (because they are
enriching or easy or whatever) what difference does it make what happens
in aggregate?
Marcus
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