Glen writes:
<<Consider the idea that social justice (equality and equality of opportunity for all) is the most _powerful_ way to, or the most efficient path toward, a maximimally effective biosphere. Every person (or plant or animal) that dies is a loss of power, a loss of productivity. Every poor or underprivileged person hyper-constrained by their environment results in suboptimal world. Now, consider the idea that truth is two-fold: a) understanding the world well enough to b) effectively control the world.>> Many hands make light work. Due to coordination overheads, however, if there are too many hands then more work is needed. (Or rather, it doesn't matter of individuals are excluded from a group if the group's work is easy.) If there aren't immediate resource constraints, and energy barriers to escaping a local minima seem high or are hard to estimate (or imagine), keeping underprivileged individuals out of a group is, from some perspectives, rational. If we assume that there will be a distribution of productivities for each person adding to the group, how does the group estimate how at what rate to tolerate low productivity vs. high productivity additions to the group? For an average member of a group (or the whole group) how do existing group members prevent potentially more productive candidates from displacing them? Sure, one could make a simulation of all this, or apply game theory. I don't think that gets at a fundamental question which is why should any selfish agent care if the biosphere is effective? The environment just needs to not to completely collapse and of course those global environmental questions are too big for most agents to address by themselves. Perhaps there is really nothing to know -- just vote, fight, compete, etc. as appropriate for prevailing social (dis)order. Even given the goal of omniscience and omnipotence and an ever-increasing ambition for harder problems, it still isn't clear that every agent is useful. Some agents may consume more resources than they contribute. Or just from a light cone type of argument it can cost more to send a message, do a calculation, and return a result, than doing it within a smaller network. From the pro- social justice perspective, one might argue that it is just too difficult to anticipate what constitutes `fit' behavior, so everyone must be supported. On the other hand there sure seems to be a lot of similar individuals in the population. In this `global' view, it seems some coherent (but arbitrary) vision is needed to identify which hard problems to tackle and how to combine resources to do it. Coherent visions tend to come from individuals or small groups. Marcus ________________________________ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of glen ☣ <geprope...@gmail.com> Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2016 11:03:26 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Truth vs. Social Justice on college campuses Thanks for the response. Below, I'll propose _alternatives_, the plausibility of which I believe to greater or lesser extents. What I believe to be the case is irrelevant, though. The point is to provide alternatives (what "Millian" might actually mean, in contrast to what Haidt seems to think it means). On 12/05/2016 09:14 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > A) Are /Truth/ and /Social Justice/ in any way different? > > I think they are categorically different... they represent different > goals and values. This is not to say that they are fundamentally > incompatible, however. I *think* your argument implies that you believe that > they are very compatible, possibly to the point that the pursuit of truth > serves social justice, or in the strong "they are no different" case, that > social justice *also* serves truth. My own belief is that the pursuit of > truth should be bounded by reasonable merits of social justice and that > social justice should be grounded in truth. I *think* this is different > than saying that they are no different from one another. Consider the idea that social justice (equality and equality of opportunity for all) is the most _powerful_ way to, or the most efficient path toward, a maximimally effective biosphere. Every person (or plant or animal) that dies is a loss of power, a loss of productivity. Every poor or underprivileged person hyper-constrained by their environment results in suboptimal world. Now, consider the idea that truth is two-fold: a) understanding the world well enough to b) effectively control the world. But this alternative is not, as you put it, truth in service to social justice or vice versa. They are one and the same thing. You cannot effectively understand/control the world without social justice or vice versa. Since the two always, exactly overlap, then they are the same. (Perhaps in some Platonic ideal, they are different. But that leads to a distinction without a difference.) I think this idea could be made (eventually) falsifiable. Those who disagree with it should help in the formulation, rather than simply denying it. > B) Apparent conflicts we have seen are (or not) between /Truth/ and /Social > Justice./ > [...] > Trying to make them identical seems to confront what I apprehend to be a > fundamental truth about Truth and that is that in it is nominally absolute, > it is not relative while Social Justice is fundamentally relative to the > "Social System" or "Ideals" we are trying to provide justice for or around? But this ignores plenty of good arguments against naive realism. Even if there is a unitary truth out there that we might be able to find/perceive/manipulate, there's no guarantee that our structures (physiology, hereditary mechanisms, social systems, etc) are capable of finding/perceiving/manipulating that unitary truth. We may be stuck with pluralism no matter what we do. Hence, reality would be plural just like our social systems (and vice versa). Again, this could be (and has been to some extent in more speculative physics) formulated so that it's (almost) falsifiable. But we haven't yet falsified pluralist truth. So, it's an alternative we must consider. But when I said that to Eric, I had in mind the more banal cases that we could pick apart (like getting someone like Curtis Yarvin uninvited from a programming conference or somesuch). I _bet_ that I could formulate an argument that uninviting such jackasses _is_ the pursuit of truth. Whether or not anyone would take the time to hack their way through my argument is another story, of course. 8^) > C) This alleged conflict is somehow more critical than others which ... > > I think the discussion emerges from decades of their appearing to have > been such a conflict, especially in the domain of education. Hm. I tend to think it's just apophenia. People really really _want_ institutions to be simple things. They really want it to be _easy_ to, say, plant and harvest a garden, even in New York City. They _want_ students to listen to them. They want it to be easy to program firmware devices. Etc. But, unfortunately, EVERYTHING IS HARD (at least until it's easy 8^). The oversimplification made by Haidt is just evidence that he wants his social psych problem to be easy. He wants to have identified the culprit and spend the rest of his days yapping about his solution. I certainly empathize. I didn't want to spend dozens of hours tracking down my last memory leak, either. But that difficulty doesn't cause me to blanketly assert that the cause of all memory leaks is _unitary_ and I should adopt a single, inviolable good to pursue. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
