Neo-Liberalism

[Emily Lake]

It isn't, but that opens the door to counting any society where the majority of people's survival, procreation, and happiness needs were adequately met as successful, which would arguably include the vast majority of pre-capitalist agrarian communities and pre-agrarian tribal communities when you account for technological differences.

... Umm... so... if you “account” for the thing that arguably arose as a direct result of 1) agriculture, 2) hierarchical social structures, and 3) capital investments fueling innovations and technological advances... your argument is that people with much shorter life expectancy, surviving births, much worse overall health burdens, and whose focus when it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy was almost exclusively focused on survival and reproduction were actually better off?



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[J842P]

It isn't, but that opens the door to counting any society where the majority of people's survival, procreation, and happiness needs were adequately met as successful, which would arguably include the vast majority of pre-capitalist agrarian communities and pre-agrarian tribal communities when you account for technological differences.

... Umm... so... if you “account” for the thing that arguably arose as a direct result of 1) agriculture, 2) hierarchical social structures, and 3) capital investments fueling innovations and technological advances... your argument is that people with much shorter life expectancy, surviving births, much worse overall health burdens, and whose focus when it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy was almost exclusively focused on survival and reproduction were actually better off?



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Actually, the transition form Paelolithic to Neolithic lifestyles (i.e. farming) was associated with overall worse health burdens, lower life expectancy, and significantly less free time. It wasn't until relatively modern times that farming-people have "caught up", so to speak, and that's mostly in health burdens, although, we now have a new set of chronic diseases to contend with. And certainly, we have nowhere near as much free time.

So yes, if you live in a modern, industrializes/post-industrialized nation (a relatively rich subset of the world population) then yes, overall, you are better off than your Paleolithic ancestors.

But even today, the average height in Southern Europe is smaller than the average height of the peoples that used to walk those lands in Paleolithic times.

 

[PyramidHead]

It isn't, but that opens the door to counting any society where the majority of people's survival, procreation, and happiness needs were adequately met as successful, which would arguably include the vast majority of pre-capitalist agrarian communities and pre-agrarian tribal communities when you account for technological differences.

... Umm... so... if you “account” for the thing that arguably arose as a direct result of 1) agriculture, 2) hierarchical social structures, and 3) capital investments fueling innovations and technological advances... your argument is that people with much shorter life expectancy, surviving births, much worse overall health burdens, and whose focus when it comes to Maslow’s hierarchy was almost exclusively focused on survival and reproduction were actually better off?



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In addition to what J842P said, I will add this: nobody is arguing that capitalism has given us nothing of worth, or that it should never have existed. Least of all Marx! He predicted the failure of Russian and Chinese attempts at implementing socialism on the grounds that they had not yet gone through the phase of industrial capitalism. Both were podunk farming societies full of peasants, in a world of steam engines and tanks.

However, the explosion of innovation and technological progress was not solely a matter of capital investment, as you probably know. Actually, the USSR was often the model that the United States borrowed from. Before then, we had very little interest in taking publicly funded research and transforming it into consumer products, which is basically the norm today. That was a contrivance of Soviet accelerated industrialism, which took an agrarian society to the point of being able to contend with the world's industrial superpower in less than 70 years... not enough people realize how astonishing this is.

But it's beside the point, which is that now, we have everything we need: not only do we have historical, psychological, social and anthropological knowledge that yes, it's possible to meet the needs of everyone through cooperation, we also have the technology that could allow us to do it easier than ever before. I notice you didn't dispute that the societies I mentioned were more egalitarian and less coercive; all you said was that they lacked our technology and its conveniences. Unless you're implying that they would have been even LESS successful if they had things like birth control, the internet, mass production, and cities crisscrossing the earth, my point still stands. If anything, the technology of today (and the incredible abundance it enables) makes it even MORE pressing that we abolish the system that helped create it so quickly, because the same system places the fruits of its inventions in people's hands based on privilege and wealth, not need.

 

[Elixir]

Lol! My bad - poor choice of words.

No worries, I didn’t assume you actually meant designed. It was partly just making sure, because I’ve been blindsided be ID people before... but also in part because I thought it was funny [emoji38]

"Design" in the sense that I intended, is simply the inherent tendency of closed systems within this universe to self-organize. It is such that all populations of imperfect self-replicators undergo evolution. That applies not only to biological organisms, but ANY entity that reproduces imperfect copies of itself, such as a computer program using genetic algorithms. I don't see social trends as strictly adhering to that description - but maybe, in certain cases.

Again, the only thing "sought" by the process is reproductive success. I get peeved about the use of the loose colloquial definition of evolution where it is intentionally or through ignorance, conflated with the biological definition - e.g. by creationists.

It’s not ignorance or intention, in this case. It’s simply that I don’t have any term that fits as closely... so I make do with what I’ve got.

Humor me, and step out of the strict biological sense for a bit. Ideas “replicate” when they pass from one person to another, don’t they? And the replicate imperfectly. Relationships among elements in a complex system aren’t invented new each time a pair changes, what worked before is the default... and it continues to work until something in the conditions changes. In that sense, the relationship is replicated, but it is also imperfect because the environment, the set of conditions in which the relationship is occurring, is not static.

I know thus is an extremely abstract application of a specific concept. Think of it like extending the concept of “oak” to the concept of “tree” then to “Forest “ and eventually to “ecology”. I’m not claiming to be super brilliant or anything, just trying to frame that I know this is abstract, but it’s rooted in something reasonable.

So consider an oxygen atom at moderate temperatures in a neutrally charged environment. That oxygen atom will pair with the nearest oxygen atom, even if there are hydrogen atoms present. The “relationship” is the pairing. Now, most of the time, this is going to be true... but sometimes there are going to be pockets of other elements closer, and the oxygen will bond with them, even if it’s not as strong a bond... they do what makes them most stable in their current environment. So that relationship “replicates”, and it does so “imperfectly”. Now let’s say that the temperature drops and there’s an electrical charge added. Now it’s less stable for oxygen to pair with oxygen - it’s more stable for oxygen to pair with two hydrogens. The dynamic at play - the relationship that produces the highest degree of organization, the highest degree of order, changes with the environment.

Now shift a bit and think about viruses. They replicate, but they don’t replicate in the same way other organism do when we usually talk about evolution. They hijack cells and make copies of themselves. But they also evolve, don’t they? They change with conditions, and those viruses that are better at replications themselves in a given set of conditions are the ones that persist.

At the end of the day, I do t think genes actually care about reproduction. They care about their material persisting and bring copies for as long as possible. They don’t care about sex, sex us nothing more than the mechanism by which that genetic code persists longer.

A genetic algorithm doesn’t reproduce, it persists the winners to the next iteration. Same thing when it comes to ideas, societies, and any other complex relationship within a dynamic environment. That which is “fit” persists until it is no longer fit.

*All references to things caring, choosing, or other anthropomorphisms are not to be taken literally. There just aren’t any words for it that don’t include those kinds of terms!



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Yeah, all that... Good post.
I won't niggle about it except to try to clarify - I didn't mean that genetic algorithms reproduce, but that the iterations they come up with "are reproduced". The fitness landscape of those iterations is dictated by the programmer, so the whole analogy fails at that point. And the methods of reproduction employed doesn't matter (virii evolve).
Still... I wish there was another word for the "evolution" of ideas etc., so that the biological process could be referred to more accurately - or at least as a more discrete process from what happens to ideas....