Explanation of the day

[andrewducker]

There are various explanations of why "extreme" political positions do not work in the long term. This is one of the best ones I've seen - explicitly from a modelling/engineering perspective:

My problem with Objectivism is the same problem I have with doctrinaire Communism; they are both, in engineering parlance, trivial solutions.

When you try to model any complex system you often find yourself trying to solve a complex mathematical model with many parameters. You want a number to plug into each that makes the whole thing balance. Very early on in learning how to do this you discover that setting some of the key parameters to zero lets you do this much more easily, but the result is useless because it tells you nothing about a realistic system. In a classic predator/prey population model, for instance, you can easily set the number of rabbits to be zero, and find it very easy to solve for the number of foxes (also zero). This is a valid solution, but a useless one for modelling population dynamics.

And, IMHO, extreme political theories do this with human society. "Let's set X to zero!" the Objectivists/Communists/whatever exclaim, where X is variously altruism, property rights or some other aspect of society that they first assume can be reduced to a single number and then further assume can be switched off by sheer Application of Will. But their pretty little toy society that results is a trivial solution to real-world social concerns; unrealistic, unhelpful and downright unachievable unless you overcome that pesky human reluctance to have our deep-seated social goals reprogrammed for us. Which is why the Communists end up resorting to Gulags, and the Objectivists don't even get that far, because it turns out that even trying to beat altruism out of people doesn't work.
- Simon Bradshaw/major_clanger

Comments

History

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

And, when you do do away with government, one tends to emerge, and usually not a very nice one. See, e.g., pre-feudal France.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Nice.

I was tickled that the UK Pirate Party have a political agenda wiki. It'd be interesting to see what unintended bills (or portions of bills) develop organically.

Because for the most part, 'extreme' political positions seem to develop from one or two people, who build their model on simplistic foundations and who need a bit more (citation needed).

[andrewducker]

Sounds about right to me. They're the "rationalist" answer to religious beliefs. Start from something simple that makes you happy and then build up from there, no matter how silly the edifice you end up with.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

It's all a symptom of Engineer's Disease.

[andrewducker]

I have a link about that in my Read-It-Later, waiting for me to write a post about it :->

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Objectivism isn't exactly about setting altruism to zero, nor even about setting the manipulation of people by getting them to be altruists to zero. It might be about setting the desire to make good stuff to maximum and the desire to get what one wants without thinking to zero.