Very cool, if true

> Cooperative behaviour is contagious

Indeeed! This is one common response to the, "Well, anarchists are stupid because people are basically selfish" objection.

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Yes - people are incredibly social. We do have some problems spreading that - Dunbar's number seems to be a limit to how far most people willing to treat others as being in-group - but given the right atmosphere people will be generous and understanding in general.

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Which is why anarchists often suggest structuring things by affinity groups and loose alliances of those groups.

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Yup, that's workable in some ways. I think that you need wider rules though. I'm in favour of different sized groups for different reasons, and I think that (for instance) equality rights should exist across all groups, which means that you need a level of policy-setting at that level, and also enforcement, which means that you need to have income at that level.

I think that groups that are too large end up being authoritarian in nature - I think that one of the reasons that the USA (and Russia) have massive social problems is that they are just too large to rule in a democratic manner because their makeup is too disparate. This leads to either deadlock (the USA a lot of the time) or authoritarianism (Russia).

Break things down into smaller units and they start working better - the price you then pay is quite different laws across the EU on many subjects (and the EU is also having problems as it picks up countries with significantly different cultures).

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I struggle with the idea of "laws" and "enforcement". These are the exact things I'd like to get away from, since there is no guarantee that the lawmakers and enforcers are any more free from prejudice than I am. I hope that if you change the structures which make it in peoples' self-interest to be bastards to each other, there'll be less bastardy, and less need for laws and enforcements. Private property ownership is a good example.

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And now we're going the other way, to "People would be lovely, if only society didn't make them bad.", which I find just as unlikely as "People would be evil, if society didn't stop them."

How are you going to stop people having private property ownership inside their group? Or that group from attacking other groups? Or an individual group reverting to feudalism? Or prevent groups that are horribly homophobic, or practice female circumcision from springing up?

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The questions you've asked are widely answered within anarchist viewpoints. Rather than doing a complete 101 here, it might be worthwhile for you to read up in some FAQs if you're interested. Here are some good links:

An Anarchist FAQ
Anarchism Reddit FAQ
Anarchy Archives

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Aha! That looks like weekend reading. A very quick look indicates that they're largely organising around work/production syndicates, which seems odd to me, but I'll read more deeply when I have the chance.

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interactiveleaf.livejournal.com

I find just as unlikely as "People would be evil, if society didn't stop them."

I've always thought that government has helped to perform one of two disparate functions: Either to stop the sociopaths from taking over, or to help the sociopaths take over.

There are a fair number of sociopaths out there, you know.

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Hence my point...

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interactiveleaf.livejournal.com

Mmmmm. Your point is that those two things are equally as unlikely. My point is that they are equally as likely, and that if you look close enough, you will find that one of them (no bets on which one) is one of the primary focuses of government.

Mind I'm not saying "the government" because what with federal, state, county, city, township, and other "local' governments, "the government" does not actually exist as a single entity anywhere in the world (that I am aware of, anyway.)

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Aaah, my point was that people will do both, there is no primal human nature that would produce all good people, or all evil people, if only we were left in a state of nature.

Of course we're going to have bad people - both naturally and as a product of society, and we need to deal with them.

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interactiveleaf.livejournal.com

Oh; that makes it more clear, thank you!

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Sorry I wasn't clearer before - just busy at work and not spending enough time on writing clear replies!

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simont

The Karate Kid link is interesting, although it inspires in me a strong urge to ignore its main point in favour of arguing about its specific analysis of The Karate Kid.

Indeed, other things being equal, one would expect the kids who've been studying karate for years to win against the one who's only been learning for a few months; but the whole point is that it's primarily a comparison of the two teachers. The Cobra Kai guy whose name I've forgotten has been spending those years teaching his students the wrong things: a plethora of fancy moves without the wisdom to know which to use when. Whereas Miyagi's strength as a teacher is that he realises that that wisdom is the really important thing, and that somebody with the bare minimum of physical skill but a strong grounding in strategic wisdom and (both physical and psychological) balance can have the edge over a lot of advanced but misapplied techniques. Whether this is a realistic reflection of real karate I will leave to experts on the subject, but I don't think it's intrinsically inconsistent on its own terms as Wong would have it.

The thing that really impressed me about The Karate Kid, actually, was that the fight choreographers appeared to have read the script, really understood it, and designed the fights accordingly. All the stuff about fighting philosophies in the dialogue is reflected perfectly in the actual karate bouts we get to see. We see the other kids doing all sorts of fancy stuff, but apart from the over-the-top crane kick, Daniel really does only ever exhibit about three different responses to any attack – block this way, block that way, dodge an oncoming rush and whack the other guy across the chest as he goes past – and his edge is in tending to pick the right one of those responses. (And not even always picking the right one: he loses his share of points, and typically only wins by a little. He just gets it right a bit more often.)

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Possibly my favourite martial arts saying:

"I do not fear the ten thousand kicks you have practised once. I fear the one kick you have practised ten thousand times."

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zornhau.livejournal.com

Also, some people just have it. They can absorb a small % of a system but do it with horrible perfection.

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cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com

Yeah, I really liked this observation when I heard it.

For that matter, even without the details of WHY Daniel is able to become good at karate, all I remember about the film was that it seemed DIFFICULT. OK, maybe he didn't work for ten years, but working really hard for two months, while not enough to make you the best in the world, can be enough to make you really good comparatively. I get the impression that the author of the article had a point "people often expect things to be easier than they are because they shy away from imagining how difficult they really are", which many training montages do seem to support, and automatically applied that to karate kid, without realising karate kid seemed to do it, you know, well.

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The Karate Kid article was fun.

I had someone leaning over my shoulder yesterday while I wrote an email. Five lines took, conservatively, 30 edits. Move this line back to the start, merge these thoughts, punctuate better here, change the sign off a couple of times, lead into the crux of the email differently, etc etc.

They thought I just... wrote.

(hell, this comment took three edits)

Ever read the anecdote about the pottery class that was split in two?

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Nope - elucidate!

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It's just a cute anecdote I like to bring up.

So a teacher of a pottery class tells the students that he's splitting the class in two.

Section A will be graded on one final piece.

Section B will be graded on the weight of pottery produced - 50kg gets you a C, 75kg gets you a B, etc.

Everybody screams about how unfair it all is.

The best pieces aren't made by A.

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Presumably the point is that the kind of people who are taking a pottery class voluntarily are the kind of people who actually want to create good/interesting pottery, and setting them free from constraints leads them to produce more interesting work than people who are striving to please their teacher?

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The general point seems to be that in order to improve at making art (I also love this story), what matters is not how much time you spend straining and trying to make it, what matters is the amount of stuff you actually make.

I can back this up - the reason I'm a good non-fiction writer (and I am, at least judging from my Amazon reviews) is primarily the year I spent writing a blog on the Quake scene (where I wrote about 8,000 words a week on match writeups) and even more notably, the year or so I spent full-time on Machinima.com, where I generally had an article deadline 3-4 working days out of 5. I wrote about half a million words that year.

There's a place for sweating and trying to make something perfect (Death Knight Love Story benefitted from it, at least judging from the responses of Famous Actors to the project), but to my mind, 90% of the time people spend too much time on the angsting/procrastinating/re-polishing bits, and not enough on the just-fucking-make-it-already bits.

Another favourite quote, from Steve Jobs - "Real artists ship".

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simont

The quote I've tended to hear, in much the same vein, is: "Amateurs think that if only they could be inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professionals know that if they had to rely on inspiration, they'd be amateurs."

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

Also, "Amateurs practice until they can do something right. Professionals practice until they can't do it wrong."

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What he said. :)

If you produce 75kg of pottery, you've learned how the material works, learned how it cracks in the kiln, learned how not to glaze it, and likely experimented with the limits of the material. And you've developed a voice - a relationship. Your understanding improves, and you make better art.

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Aaah, not knowing anything about pottery I assumed from your initial description that you were talking about a single piece of three different sizes.

The idea that "practising lots makes you better" seemed so obvious that it never occurred to me that it might be the moral :->

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I wondered where you got that from, yeah. :)

My example could have been clearer.

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

There may also be a hint that pursuing excellence before you know what you're doing isn't very effective.

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The effort article misses a key point.

He makes it sound like the kids who are awesome at karate just willpowered and self-disciplined their way to it, through denial of anything fun in favour of karate. In actual fact, the chances are the kids who are awesome at karate are awesome at it because if you meet them after two solid hours of karate training, and offer them the choice of a new XBox game or another two hours of karate, will look at you like you're a moron and say "karate. Duh. Why the hell would I rather play some game?"

The standard advice for wannabe filmmakers is "if you can manage to do anything else for a job without getting really unhappy, don't try to get into film." Top Warcraft guild players don't understand why some people, after repeatedly dying to a new boss for six straight hours, might not want to go and farm gold for their repairs then come back tomorrow for another six hours. You can generally tell the superstar coder because he's the guy who goes home from his coding job and codes more (paging

anthonybailey,

skx).

It's all about the love, and that seems to be something the Cracked.com guy is missing.

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I suppose what he's wandered away from is that very question - is writing/coding/art what you really want to do? So why aren't you doing it?

I've met a gazillion wannabe writers who talk about this neat idea for a novel, etc etc. Or my favorite, wannabe roleplaying game designers who won't discuss their beautiful idea without everyone signing an NDA, and who've been supposedly working on the design for the last decade. 10 years and you've nothing to show for it?

But the best game designer I've worked with recently is kicking all sorts of ass since just last September, because he puts hours and hours, every single day, into a good design, tests and retests mechanics, and turns everyone who offers feedback into a reviewer/cheerleader.

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Yeah.

I now have a one-line test for whether I expect someone to make it as a filmmaker. It's "Is he/she making films?" Or, frankly, making something.

"Smart and gets things done".

(as a side note - yeah, anyone who won't discuss their idea without an NDA is, from experience, a n00b at best and an idiot at worst, unless they already have significant funding in place. Ideas are cheap, execution is expensive.)

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I think the love is assumed by "You have to work really, really hard at it." Because people that don't love things just don't work that hard at it.

I mean, I'm not a superstar coder - but I outclass the majority of the people in the office because I do play around with code for fun. If I didn't also have lots of other hobbies I'd no doubt be better :->

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His take all sounds a bit puritanical, suffering-is-holy, nose-to-the-grindstone bollocks to me, though.

If you're doing something that's meant to be your heart's desire and you'd rather be doing something else (I initially said "you aren't enjoying it", but actually the definition here is something that you're passionate enough about that you'll naturally keep hitting it even when it's pissing you off) , ur doin it rong.

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Didn't come across that way to me. Just said that if you want to be actually great at something then you need to put in the hours, it won't fall into your lap. People can't make an informed decision as to whether they _do_ want to be great at something without knowing that, and they will have an inflated sense of what they will achieve, which leads to unhappiness.

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zornhau.livejournal.com

That you have to put in the *right* effort, and have the right basic make up to succeed.

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missedith01.livejournal.com

Any website that includes the phrase "Click goat droppings for more information" gets my vote. :-)

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