From: james (james.e.taylor-2@stud.man.ac.uk)
Date: Sat May 17 2003 - 06:36:31 MDT
On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 10:46:56PM -0400, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 5/16/2003 3:47:16 PM Central Standard Time,
> james.e.taylor-2@stud.man.ac.uk writes: I don't mean to address this to you
> in particular, Ron, but can we all stop talking about The Left and The Right,
> now? It's worse than TV.
>
> James,
> It is strange that you bring my name up. I'll bet that if you check
> the archives you will find I rarely start a political discussion -- perhaps
> never.
I specifically did not wish to bring your name up. I just replied to
your post because it was the latest one that used the terms Left and
Right as if they were some reified Thing. I'm absolutely not against
political discussion: like I said, I think it can be relevant to us, but
getting emotionally involved with your "side", be that "Left" or "Right"
is almost a guarantee that no opinions will be changed, no resolutions
will be made, and polarisation will render the discussion quite
meaningless to onlookers.
Lee makes an interesting point as to whether this kind of entrenchment
is inevitable. He suspects yes, and I have to agree that human nature
makes it likely. An "Us versus Them" attitude seems evolutionarily
advantageous. The genes that built the human body and brain cared not
for cooperation, only for conflict with competing genes. Cooperation
clearly evolved at some point, memetically or genetically, but the
animal instinct to split the world into two simple groups still prevails
occasionally. Maybe even most of the time. I consider "Me vs. Him", "Us
vs. Them", "This tribe vs. That tribe", "This nation vs. That nation",
"This ideology vs. That ideology" to be manifestations of the same
thing. Whatever the cause is, I believe it is a quirk of natural
selection that should, at least in principle, yield to superrationality.
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Thus, IMO progress will arise as we come to understand how
> it is that a person with dispositions {X} growing up in
> environmental conditions {Y} at a time T in history starts
> to lean left or right, or becomes a libertarian, or
> "progressive", or whatever.
I think that would require nothing less than a complete explanation of
the human mind :)
Incidentally Lee, I hadn't seen the Nolan chart before. Thanks for the
pointer. I still think it's just the two dimensional analogue of the
left/right fallacy, but less fallacious. To increase the accuracy,
should we add more dimensions? Again, a perfectly accurate chart would
be the universe itself, with all its unanalysable nonlinearity.
This remind me of the Myers-Briggs personality types. That partions
personality into 16 groups, rather than 2. The granularity is increased,
and with it the accuracy, but it's still not perfect. Refining the
dissection would cover more edge cases, but increase the complexity,
which such models are designed to reduce.
I believe the underlying question is about simple, linear models of
complex nonlinear phenomenons. At what level of complexity does the
model cease to be sufficiently useful? At what level of simplicity does
the model cease to be sufficiently accurate?
I won't pretend to have thought hard enough about this to offer an
answer, but I know the Left/Right model is so innacurate that it's
invariably used as a weapon rather than a useful simplification.
-- James
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