I will also add Le Guin's "A non-Euclidean view of California as a cold place to be" as the spiritual complement of Ostrom's mathematics and science.
Notably, both of these talk about problems in science, and how it's "easy" to solve...if you have a Science God to issue the Science Decree.
And then we start overthrowing the evil Science God Elsevier in favor of a more decentralized science publishing. This is a huge victory for good over evil, but it takes the form of replacing the evil Science God with Moloch.
Centralization enables despotism. Decentralization enables Moloch. Coordination problems are a real issue we need to address; preferably without abusive consolidation of power.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/sscpodcast/Meditations_on_Moloch.m...
Instead of looking at rulers, the picture has to start at the root. I think they kinda skip over that fact, taking it for granted, though the first principia discordia quote that's noted does imply it.
It's an extraordinarily powerful piece though, and an interesting stylistic counterpoint to Moloch's oneiric ramblings.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
Their argument declares an inevitable consolidation in amount of farms - so briefly explained it amounts to an article of faith. And a plain error encoded in two simple tables, where larger farms magically produce less waste products (pollution).
Inspired by Allan Ginsberg’s poem Moloch, Scott Alexander once wrote of coordination failures:
> Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question—C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers—what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?
> And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.
>There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
> The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
> Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”
> Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”
> The implicit question is—if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch.” It’s powerful not because it’s correct—nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything—but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.
Scott Alexander saw the face of the Enemy, and he gave it a name—thinking that perhaps that would help.
It may be the best articulation I have seen of the Christian idea that the world is fallen.
And yes, when we say that, this is what we mean.
> Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.
(There might even be something to it, given how long human history from the emergence of behaviorally-modern humans (10,000 BC?) to the beginning of the historical record actually was. Who's to say that human societies in that time period did not gradually evolve to a sort of cultural- and value- "modernity", that was subsequently forgotten in some sort of great, worldwide social crisis? That might have been the true "Fall from Eden" perhaps, scattering human societies far and wide.)
Yes, Scott's essay and the Christian idea of fallen-ness both fit the following high-level description: "The world is in a mess because of the way people are."
No, they are not the same idea, and claiming that they are (1) is unfair to Scott, since it suggests that all he did was to take an idea that "we" (i.e., Christians) already had and express it well; and (2) promotes Christianity in a way it doesn't deserve, since it suggests that Scott's specific and ingenious account of just how human nature leads to the world being a mess is one that "we" already had.
For all I know, perhaps some individual Christian thinkers had the same specific insights as Scott -- e.g., I think C S Lewis had some smart things to say about how the essence of hell is competition, or something like that -- but it certainly isn't accurate to say that "we" mean what Scott describes.
[Disclaimer: I am not a Christian. But I was one for multiple decades. When I say "we" above I am echoing NateEag's language.]
1. Christian ideas of "fallenness" do not generally involve Scott's insights about game theory and coordination problems.
2. Christian ideas of "fallenness" generally emphasize other aspects of human sinfulness besides the ones relevant to Scott's analysis (selfishness, greed, competitiveness).
3. Christian ideas of "fallenness" generally incorporate (as important features) elements that are conspicuously absent from Scott's analysis. "Cursed is the ground because of you": following Genesis, Christians commonly reckon that the world's "fallenness" explains its imperfect hospitability to human flourishing: just as some people look forward to a "post-scarcity" society, the Garden of Eden (whether regarded as historical or mythical or both) is a "pre-scarcity" society: one that provides everyone with what they need and want. "Since death came by a man, so the resurrection of the dead also comes by a man.": following 1 Corinthians, Christians commonly reckon that the very existence of death is the result of human "fallenness". None of this stuff is in Scott's discussion of Moloch; none of it needs to be.
(To keep myself honest, I just did a little experiment: I looked up Genesis 3 and 1 Corinthians 15 in a few books I had on my shelf: the "New Jerome Biblical Commentary" (one volume, liberal-ish RC), "The theology of the book of Genesis" by R W L Moberly (Anglican), the "Cambridge Bible Commentary" on 1,2 Corinthians (liberal Anglican-ish). I also looked up "fall" in the Oxford Companion to the Bible (liberal-ish Anglican-ish) and the "Concise Dictionary of Theology" of O'Collins and Farrugia (middle-of-the-road RC), which are the only two encyclopaedia-like things I have handy. There's no hint in any of them of anything like Scott's analysis. Of course that's a small sample, from a narrow-ish range of theological perspectives -- no evangelicals, traditionalist RCs, Eastern Orthodox, death-of-God ultraliberals, etc. -- but I think it's enough to make it clear that it's not true that Scott's analysis is what "we" (= Christians) mean by the idea that the world is fallen.)
And actually demand army creates in sosiety may be very very useful since it drives innovation.
I think the idea that a centralized solution will bring us Eden is not only naive, but it is also exactly playing into the hands of the centralized elite because it does not question them. Distracting from the blame of the elites is a convenient sleight of hand. The notion that efforts must be strengthened to establish a centralized control deprives us of means of getting rid of corruption by threats of forced replacement.
It is unfairly simplistic, to give people their own soundbites and bolster their already established opinions, when carefully approaching any one of the things listed would properly require an entire volume and much study.
This essay is excellent - gets a little bogged down in rubbing your nose in enough examples, but has enough depth of concept to compensate.
This book is an exploration of making and unmaking, where making is civilization as materialized care for pain and discomfort and unmaking is the opposite demonstrated by the document tendency of torturers in war to use benign household items as weapons, thus inverting the structure of civilization.
Here a simple quote to show Scarry's way of appreciating made objects:
> It is almost universally the case in everyday life that the most cherished object is one that has been hand-made by a friend: there is no mystery about this, for the object's material attributes themselves record and memorialize the intensely personal, extraordinary because exclusive, interior feelings of the maker for just this person: This is for you. But anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this small way, be well.
And here a more in-depth quote from the book's introduction to show the deeper purpose of the book which is to hold up the imagining and construction of material civilization as a primary ethical concern, being the positive inverse of torture and war:
> The vocabulary of "creating," "inventing," "making," "imagining," is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant one: "imagining," for example, is usually described as an ethically neutral or amoral phenomenon; the phrase "material making" is similarly flat in its connotations, and is even (because of its conflation with "materialism") sometimes pronounced with a derisive inflection. But an unspoken question begins to arise in Part One which might be formulated in the following way: given that the deconstruction of creation is present in the structure of one event which is widely recognized as being close to an absolute of immorality (torture), and given that the deconstruction of creation is again present in the structure of a second event regarded as morally problematic by everyone and as radically immoral by some (war), is it not peculiar that the very thing being deconstructed—creation—does not in its intact form have a moral claim on us that is as high as the others' is low, that the action of creating is not, for example, held to be bound up with justice in the way those other events are bound up with injustice, that it (the mental, verbal, or material process of making the world) is not held to be centrally entailed in the elimination of pain as the unmaking of the world is held to be entailed in pain's infliction? The morality of creating cannot, of course, be inferred from the immorality of uncreating, and will instead be shown on its own terms. That we ordinarily perceive it as empty of ethical content is, it will be argued, itself a signal to us of how faulty and fragmentary our understanding of creation is, not only in this respect but in many others. It is not the valorization of making but its accurate description that is crucial, for if it is in fact laden with ethical consequence, then it may be that a firm understanding of what it is will in turn enable us to recognize more quickly what is happening not only in large-scale emergencies like torture or war but in other long-standing dilemmas, such as the inequity of material distribution.
I was surprised to find it was never discussed on HN (plenty of submissions, no traction). So go read it HNers.
Then the essay comes, builds some new connections, and drives home one or more new points that you were building up to unknowingly. The whole structure is strengthened, and some parts of it even get something resembling a final shape.
We sometimes then just call it an enjoyable read and move on, until the next time. But regardless of the outcome the process itself is one of the best things in the human experience.
By the way, does anyone know and use automatic summary plug-ins?
So far capitalism has driven moral progress and increased standards of living, but maybe we'd be wrong to trust it forever. If the logical end result of following progress is us innovating ourselves out of existence (AI, nuclear weapons, whatever) then we might need to take drastic measures to avoid the default outcome, get off the path we're on and onto a different one.
And MBPI--because it's based on field observations in the 1910's--is the least politically correct typology.
2. But because this is HN, SOMEONE is going to say that MB is pseudoscience.
3. So I needed to premptively respond to the would-be smart alec.
