On 04/16/2014 10:48 AM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
What is the question here? What are the historical conditions that lead to one or the other forming? How to destabilize such a social system? An answer to the latter is to vote for progressive candidates, seems to me, and let (Glen's) `database' grow from those experiences. Try stuff, and collectively learn from those experiences..
Well, for me -- and I think what Steve was arguing for that lead to Roger's criticism, I'd like to be able to ask the question of whether any of them [pat|mat|ky|*]riarchy arise "naturally" at all... or even regardless of equivocation around "natural", whether some of them arise more frequently than others. But especially, I'd like to ask questions surrounding their strength.
Haphazardly trying stuff is great and I fully support it. ;-) But it would be better to know how _hard_ you have to try in order to escape, say, patriarchy. I'd also like to know their positions relative to one another (mostly distance between them). If we push too hard against patriarchy are we more likely to land in a kyriarchy than a matriarchy? Can we maintain the system between attractors? Or are they too densely packed so that the slightest perturbation sends us hurtling into the nearest neighbor? Perhaps we could engineer it to flit between 2 or more of them with delicately timed tweaks?
But it's also possible that these systems aren't attractors at all... perhaps the state space is relatively isotropic and being stuck in any one region really is a matter of a few gamers (lineages of gamers) keeping it there?
To my mind, we won't make any progress on this sort of thing until we make a serious effort to define the space, which means building a schema that credibly captures enough of the salient variables. The spaces spanned by tiny bases like just "money" (or a similarly small set like "money" and "family") are just too _ideal_. They aren't rich enough analogs to give us any insight into the real space to which they refer.
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