Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 87. (Read 288375 times)

Regardless of what I think, I have certain needs, because of my very biology and physiology. I can train myself to eat less, if I want to, but eventually I will die if I continue to refuse food. That is not to say that people should be force-fed, but that I don't see why we should do the opposite: forcefully deny them of food (and the rest: water, shelter, nurturing environment, etc...). I'd say providing those needs is very compassionate, rather than arrogant, and the opposite behaviour is violent and despotic.


There is, and a lot. First of all, their definition of weak is highly speculative and not scientifically supported. Some eugenics programs wanted to get rid of homosexuals. What is the scientific rational behind that? Secondly, the goal is to maximise well being, which includes social relations, how well we interact with each other and how we feel. If, for example, somebody feels remorse because other people actuated a eugenic program of somebody they know, they will feel sorrow, despair, and other negative emotions, which result in an unstable psycho-physical condition, and that can be measured, studied and verified scientifically.

Just because the mainstream view of science is very narrow and simplistic, it doesn't mean that it reflects what science really is. If you think that there is nothing scientifically wrong with eugenics programs, it means that you have a very limited understanding of what science is.


Yes we do. We don't know what healthy is in its entirety, but the same goes for aerodynamics, physics, medicine, engineering, etc. I don't see you complaining about people building cellphones, flatscreens and giving you antibiotics.


The premise is wrong. Perfect individual? Perfection is an empty word, you might have a desirable condition, given certain factors, What you might have, theoretically, is a collection of desirable individual types, given different environments and conditions.


I don't understand the question. First of all, cloning humans is not a good idea, both morally and scientifically. Secondly, what do you want to achieve with this?


Because of what history shows us. According to classical economics theories, FOSS, Creative Commons, Open Source Ecology, Open Hardware initiative, the Rep Rap, Couchsurfing, Just for the love of it, etc. should not exist.

Yet they do.

This, and many other things, prove that people naturally want to work towards the betterment of society, if they are given a chance.

Obviously, as long as it defines what is normal. What is healthy? What is rational? You claim to know these. Two conditions in which I am willing to decide what someone needs regardless of their wants is when they are unable to communicate what they want (e.g. animals) or I am responsible of imposing my will over them (e.g. parenting). And both can sometimes be mildly arrogant.

Never mind the fact that a model can only be considered a fact only in proper context.


How is eugenics decoupled from reality? It's a fact that eliminating the weak from the gene pool will result in a healthier population. There is nothing unscientific about that. I think it's the same two fallacies. (1) You can't actually know what healthy is, and (2) you don't know enough about how it all works. You don't know which traits are desirable and which are not, and even if you claim to identify some as undesirable (maybe you gather it from living people who have those traits), you can't put weights on them to foresee what will happen if that person enters the gene pool.

Suppose you claim to have the perfect individuals according to a particular model and the technology to perfectly clone them. And you know that with sexual reproduction, it would take billions of people, millions of whom will suffer from disease before any positive trait is introduced to the population, would you take that risk? What would the RBE movement do?


Thanks, I have enough recommended readings as it is, maybe I'll check it out later. But as it stands, I'm highly sceptical about what the movement itself can achieve.


And I respect that. We almost share the same motives. Though if you don't trust people enough to control an unrestricted free market to act for the betterment of mankind, how do you suppose the same people to voluntarily work for that in a collective? I think it requires exactly the same intellectual achievement for the individuals.

I don't see how that is presented in a normative manner. It describes well established facts about human survival and human flourishing.


No, it's a completely different fallacy. What you describe is eugenics, a pseudoscience that has nothing to do with serious debate about BPS or any other model from which to start, and it's completely decoupled from reality.


No scientific evidence?
Among many, I suggest you this reading:

"General Systems Theory: Problems, Perspectives and Practice" By Lars Skyttner - Reprinted in 2005
http://www.amazon.com/General-Systems-Theory-Problems-Perspectives/dp/9812564675

As for the transition plan, there are many documents, videos, conferences and radio shows outlining how that may be achieved, and it's a continuos work in progress.

Well, I'm fairly aware of the material, but hadn't paid much attention to it, as I did watching this video. I don't see how this answers any of the questions.

Not only that, it presents the BPS model as natural law, moreover in normative manner, which I had already criticized as dangerous and thought we agreed on. This is not even tangential to scientific reasoning, don't you think? So because we believe the evolutionary model is true, would it mean that we have to eliminate the weak? It's the same kind of fallacy. The fact that it's politically appealing shouldn't make us less skeptical.

And no scientific evidence backing up the societal model and no transition plan? Sorry but there is nothing else I can offer other than repeating the questions and criticisms others have already posted.

We posted many responses and references in the discussion about this. Here's a video outlining the general principles:

Arriving at a Resource Based Economy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVPz7uXLZtI

... just as a starting point, there is much more material explaining it in details.

p.s. quick answer to your first question: nobody will take anybody's land. If you want to know how that works out watch the video and the rest of the material

Not quite. My question was, if I don't want to give up my land, would you come and get it from me venturing a fight (like retards) over it in the name of humanity? I don't want to be superficial here, just wondering how you see the path of evolution towards a RBE.

Also, a more realistic question is, whether it is better in the name of progress to fight over resources. One fact is, besides basic human necessities, economically more efficient ideas tend to take over. Although managing shit intelligently is probably a better strategy in the long run, I'd like to hear of ideas about how to get to a point where it could take over before resources are already depleted.

The second question is, what if having exact same rights isn't intelligent? I'm saying this because you stated two goals. One is equal rights and the other is resource depletion. What if these two conflict? Or, a better question is, what can these rights be if we want to reach dynamic equilibrium. And of course, is there a way to enforce these without conflicting with these two goals.

The natural resources of earth should be declared as common heritage of all people , since they weren't made by you or me they were made by nature , and we both were born on the same planet. We have the exacts same rights.

Now the question is do we behave like retards and fight over them until they are depleted or we die fighting , or do we use our brains to manage shit intelligently , the choice is yours.

I am not sure if that answer your question because it is not precised.

Good. It's a starting point, as we said. We can extend the notion of necessities, as our culture grows and our scientific understanding of what's needed by humans for a healthy development.

Couple that with dynamic equilibrium, so that we can live sustainably on the planet indefinitely, and you have the basis for an RBE.

Personally, i plan to outlast the Sun itself.

I can only speak for myself. I would like every human to have access to basic necessities, which includes access to information (not necessarily education), and I've stated my reasons for that. That can't be "the" starting point for me, but it's a starting point, so I can play that game.

I already replied several times to that, but I will answer again in a moment. First, can we agree that our starting point would be to provide access to those things?

Of course. If I understand correctly, the question is: what if someone doesn't want to give? (Sorry if this was already answered.)

Thats the whole point , to make shit in abundant quantities if possible.

You can't give what you don't have.

I will attempt to make it as simple as possible.

Fact: humans need food and clean water to survive.

Fact: we can provide food and clean water to all the people on the planet.

Fact: billions are starving to death or dying of preventable diseases, mostly due to water pollution and food deprivation.

Question: should we give people access to those necessities?

My thesis is that we must.

If that is agreed, we can build from there.

As I explained throughout the discussion, the question is of access, not of forcing.

Necessities are not opinion, they are objective facts. If you have access to the necessities, and still decide not to use them, it's not going to be imposed on you.

What I don't understand is why should we forcefully deprive people of the necessities, even though we can technically provide them.

A dystopia comes into place as soon as you coerce people into doing certain things. By providing access to the necessities, as well as education and a nurturing environment, you are creating the basis for a civilisation worthy of this name.


I already explained this before. Good and evil are loaded terms and mean almost nothing. Let's start from the basic: necessities, then you can build up from there.

Sadly, people tend to get into semantic arguments of meaningless discussions about good and evil, while billions are starving to death.


It's not possible, and it's not even meaningful to talk about that. You don't need such conditions to know that people need food, clean water and air, shelter, education, a loving and caring environment to grow up. Regardless of what you or I think, the science shows that.

If you still in doubt about this, please see this course before continuing any further:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D


...and they are not need for the sake of the argument.


This is another common misconception. Every action one takes is for self-reward. The only difference is how many people you consider to be part of your extended family, and if you understand that your happiness is related to that of others. If you have that realisation, people call you altruistic. If not, they call you egoistic.

It's just a matter of how educated you are about human relationships.


You don't need anything definitive. It's like saying that until we understand 100% quantum mechanics, we should not try and build LCD screen, lasers and so on. Yet, we did, and it's working out wonderfully.

According to your reasoning, something like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is completely meaningless, because it's not definitive.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

Oh yes, also sociology, psychology, anthropology, behavioural neuroscience, physics, mathematics... all meaningless because they are not definitive.

meh.

Sure, as long as real scientists interpret it, this is where likes of Sam Harris become dangerous. Most of these are dystopia because of our current conditioning, not because there's something scientifically wrong with them. I can picture a world where everyone is healthy in every way and I wouldn't want to be a part of. I'll take your recommendation and do some reading though.


I think the debate here originally was whether we had enough science to start building on or not. That's a tough question. If you started engineering society by putting science in charge, and set the goal to "well being of all", would the world prosper? Or would it kill the economy so badly that there wouldn't be enough resources to allocate? One problem is that we put scientists in charge, not science, so demagogues will still get in and screw things up. Second, we don't even have a proper theory of mind, let alone clear definitions of suffering or happiness, and we have extremely limited abilities of social prediction. On top of that, social sciences have the habit of inventing reality.

Child abuse is a good example. I agree that there currently isn't an understood practical way to prevent abuse without intervening. I also think that we don't have scientific tools to measure what we sacrifice by doing so. So what if I decided to have sex with my kids? Would that undermine their psychological development by itself, or would the stigmatization of sex in society be responsible of that? Either way, since I'm the one deciding with full knowledge of consequences, I am to blame, no? Since we have no means of determining the intentions in minority cases or the far future outcome, fixing the issue at hand is to label any kind of sexual intercourse between adults and children as rape to be on the safe side. As a conventional parent, I tend to agree with that, but still not comfortable with it. It's probable that the best mode for humans is sexual social behaviour of bonobos, in which case how we are forced to raised our kids (erm, not "raping" them?) is pretty cruel.

Also, who is "we"? There are many "we"s who claim to be scientifically minded in this world, and people still go hungry.

This is where a free and unrestricted market begins to make sense. Got to go now, but this topic probably needs to be divided into smaller ones.

If you want to put any meaning into what you say you need to take semantics seriously.
Hard data does not suggest anything, but an observer of that data can.
Unfortunately suggestion is not hard at all.

There are things we need, but not everyone needs the same thing and not everyone wants what they need.
Do you want to force me, for instance, to eat more vitamins because you (or society or whoever) think it is 'better' for me?
Or will you let me eat my bad foods because i'm happy that way (which is also 'better', but this time from my perspective)?

There is no hard distinction between 'good' and 'evil'.
One person could describe something as good, while another person sees it as evil.
Thinking that you do know what is good or evil would make you pretensious.

But of course no morals at all would lead to a chaos and so we have to settle on some set of values that we all more or less agree with. And that is what our forrest of moral systems is, a collection of sets of agreed upon values.

Things are just not as simple as your need them to be.
There are many many different people with different looks on life.
I bet the Taliban have different morals than people from the USA.
And i bet your neighbor has different morals from you.

Part of being human is having a slight randomness to the genes.
What you would need is perfect clones, raised in identical environments, fed identical information so they would have identical moral values, if such a thing is even possible.
But real people are not like that.
Moral values are mostly a grey area and it's more of a moving average than anything objective.
If you look throughout history then you will find that morals are just a consensus of rules that help a population stabilize.
But these same morals can lead to oppression and revolution.
There are no universal morals.
There are, however, rules that help an animal prevail in a given environment and we have some of that stuff built in as a pointer for our own morals.
But these are not very specific and always put a tension between the individual and the group (or species or environment).
It's the field between egoism and alturism, a battle between spending energy for your own purposes or for the purposes of your community (which may or may not be serving yourself).
Since the mechanics of society change so do our morals.
If you can predict how society will function in the future you may be able to get a general feel of how morals will change.
But nothing hard or definitive.

Capitalism, socialism, fascism, communism, totalitarian regimes, free and unrestricted market...


I agree that it can be misinterpreted by non scientifically trained. But any serious discussion about human needs makes any dystopic scenario impossible. You can read the works of prof Gabor Mate or Robert Maurice Sapolsky, professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and, by courtesy, Neurosurgery, at Stanford University.


As I said, there are degrees and it's a matter of scientific debate. However, we alrady have a starting point, which is not based on human opinion, but on solid scientific facts.

Fact: we all need food and water to survive -> we should provide those for free as a right to life, since it's technically possible.
Fact: research shows that beating and abusing children undermines their psychological development -> we should not employ violence on children.
...and so on. As the research continues, we'll have more and more facts to add to our list, and we'll use the scientific method to achieve those goals.

Peace.

Well, invisible hand of the market can be a useless concept, or outright wrong, but it's not supernatural. I agree that it can be made into something supernatural when used out of context.


I'm not sure what methods you talk about (skimmed through the thread, so I'm guessing), but arguably they involve other values than the well being of society at large. In fact, I think even you would have higher values than that. For me, the misallocation is in fact disgraceful because it prevents humanity from achieving what I think are higher goals. My antipathy towards unnecessary suffering is therefore indirect, as indirect as my antipathy towards unnecessary luxury, both of which are tautologies since I am the one who defines what's necessary (or what's misallocation). This may seem redundant but I see that the free market discussion boils down to this simple nuance.


Biopsychosocial model is indeed useful. What I'm worried about is that these models can be brought out of their scope. They are not science, they are helpful for science. If you get results that are useful to reach a certain goal, it's fine. If you use them in a normative manner, or in place of the unknown or unknowable facts, that's a fallacy that paves the way to dystopia. Biopsychosocial model is a perfect path into the Brave New World.


I think the argument is not about using science to maximize well being, it's about what we know, what we don't know and what we can't know. "Not being sure" is the key to scientific discipline, and I think Atran's examples and heavy scientific language is to present what science actually looks like. Sam fucking Nobody is a dangerous person and if Hume was alive, he would beat him with a stick.


I think the discussion of method is secondary to the goal. Do we want to feed everyone? Do we want them to be happy? Do we want them to live longer? Do we want them to be free? These may not be mutually exclusive but certainly are not the same thing. Also, do we have a goal as humanity other than being here until the next impact event? I don't think any of the methods presented are inherently unscientific, they just serve different purposes. I might be wrong though...