Aux Armes, Citoyens!

Ants have far greater genetic identity than human beings and thus far less physical diversity and of course, virtually no intellectual diversity. Your hypothetical supposition amounts to saying that if only human beings weren't human beings, they could act much less like human beings.

But, really, this was hardly what you had in mind with your cheap shot at legal interpretation.
 
I’ve avoided putting on my lawyer hat or expressing my real views because in reality I don’t know if my firm’s clients have a stake or view of this litigation, but i did read the entire oral argument transcript yesterday and will say that Granholm was an easier case. Carter Phillips (arguing for Total/out of state retailers), one of the most experienced SC practitioners and sought after SC attorneys in the private bar, had few answers to most questions he was asked. The government lawyers had fewer.

I am not convinced either side positioned the arguments in this case in a way that gives the Justices an analytically sound way to resolve the case, particularly in light of history and precedent. It will be interesting to see if we even get a majority opinion. For those who don’t know, any issue for which there is no majority is “lost” by the appellant. Which means the appellate decision below would stand. Reading the Sixth Circuit decision again will be my weekend reading.
 
originally posted by MarkS:
[...] Imagine if humans could put their heads and obvious advantages together to solve some of our greatest problems.
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The fact is that we do exactly this. However, with each round of successes, a new frontier of problems heaves into view. You have to do a lot of things very well before climate change or nuclear holocaust become tangible sources of peril. On the whole, over past 10,000 years or so, the species' rate of success has been extraordinary.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
originally posted by MarkS:
[...] Imagine if humans could put their heads and obvious advantages together to solve some of our greatest problems.
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The fact is that we do exactly this. However, with each round of successes, a new frontier of problems heaves into view. You have to do a lot of things very well before climate change or nuclear holocaust become tangible sources of peril. On the whole, over past 10,000 years or so, the species' rate of success has been extraordinary.
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As Stephen Pinker and Thomas Friedman have taken pains to point out, our perspective as members of a highly privileged society experiencing declines in quality of living shouldn’t obscure the fact that globally people are far better off in most senses than they were even a generation ago. In many regards, this is a golden age for humankind, even if it doesn’t look like such in most Western democracies today.

Mark Lipton
 
Pinker's long view is a little too long for me. If I were a member of the working class, I'd much prefer it to be 1975 than now. With 30 more years of climate chsnge, we might all prefer it to be 1975.

It's always good to remember Keynes on the long term.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Pinker's long view is a little too long for me. If I were a member of the working class, I'd much prefer it to be 1975 than now..
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I think that was Mark's point.

I'm sure you're familiar with the 'elephant curve' for world income distribution. The past 30 years have hit the Western working class hard. But globally they are a trivial percent of the population and the overall gains have been undeniably great.
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
God I hate Pinker and evo-psychology in general, being both bad psychology and bad evolutionary theory. https://www.opendemocracy.net/trans...Cn7EY9-b9PH2SE6PNvTabTLpkJ67zSoUGwsO1pgttM5Tc

And global poverty halved looks more like statistical trickery: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/o...reat-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html
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Yes, it is very difficult to reduce human complexity to one model or one simple statistic. We should be skeptical of over-simplification and always very critical of measures. But economic growth is real, just as instability 100 years ago was real, and I'm not sure inequality is the most revealing indicator of overall human society.
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
God I hate Pinker and evo-psychology in general, being both bad psychology and bad evolutionary theory. https://www.opendemocracy.net/trans...Cn7EY9-b9PH2SE6PNvTabTLpkJ67zSoUGwsO1pgttM5Tc

And global poverty halved looks more like statistical trickery: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/o...reat-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html
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Otto sighting! Hah! Now I know how to flush you out. I understand the critique of Pinker but his latest book draws on WHO statistics to make the point that many factors such as childhood mortality, life expectancy, literacy rates, etc. have been improving markedly over the past 50 years. That has nothing to do with who-psych.

Mark Lipton
 
Neither of the issues Otto cites has anything to do with evolutionary psychology. Pinker (who, let's remember, started out as a very smart linguist), did write a couple of exceedingly silly books on the topic. But his most recent book on Enlightenment, which Mark, I think is referring to, is a kind of Victorian progressive argument (more Mill than Spencer) arguing that the world has become a better place and progressives are the reason. There is little question that the world is materially wealthier, that human beings are more long-lived and that it is better to be poor now than it was in the 18th century. Even if only in Europe and the US, that would be significant since Pinker's argument is in favor of the Enlightenment, which was a Euro-North American movement for better and worse. The second of the articles Otto sites, which is the more relevant one (the issue of whether anti-poverty programs have in fact reduced poverty over the last 50 years is a somewhat different one since it is more short term), really dances around the real question about the book, whether the progress Pinker cites is caused by an intellectual advance brought on by the Enlightenment, or by material advances brought on by the stunning technological growth begun by the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment, after all, began in the 17th century, while the kinds of material advances Pinker notes mostly occur after the beginning of the 19th.

And, of course, there is the deeper issue, which is not a factual one: whether attempts to better the human condition are better served by focusing on the problems in front of us or by patting ourselves on the back about how far we have come. I tend to side with Otto (unless I am putting words in his mouth, in which case I tend to side with myself) rather than Pinker (and Mark?} on that issue.
 
Jonathan and Otto,
We are arguing at cross-purposes. I am referring to the data that Pinker (and Friedman before him) musters in pursuit of his argument. I haven’t read Enlightenment, but did attend a lecture by Pinker that drew extensively on that book. My point is to counter the prevalent narrative in the developed world that things are getting worse (implicit in the Make America Great Again trope) by pointing out the implicit ethnocentrism of that view. Wherhether the improvements seen in the developing world have anything to do with the causes Pinker and others cite is a different dogfight.

Jonathan, be careful when you place the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment in opposition. Without the scientific revolution that emerged in the Enlightenment, you have no Industrial Revolution.

Mark Lipton
 
Mark,

Most versions of the history of science I read these days are much less simplistic about the relationship between doctrines of reason and the rise of modern science. I don't place the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment in opposition. Neither do I see the one as unproblematically the cause of the other.

And your argument about the value of an optimistic view of progress makes the point I was arguing for about the debate not being about facts really but about what the best progressive response to them is. I truly fail to see how not accepting that improved conditions in the developing world is self-evident, even if it is a factual error, is ethnocentric unless you are saying that we are applying inappropriate Western notions of living standards to non-Western environments, in which case I will gladly plead guilty to applying those standards and merely contest that they are inappropriate.
 
Ok, yes, the newest book is apparently a historically inaccurate (https://www.newstatesman.com/cultur...-pinker-s-embarrassing-new-book-feeble-sermon) musing on how the Enlightenment was the best thing ever and then goes on to basically do the Angels book again. He's a status quo warrior and for him everything is pretty much so perfect now that we should stop complaining or improving things. So it's not evo-psych but kind of tries to show the same thing: don't complain about existing power structures and inequalities because what we have now is the best thing ever.

Oh, side note, was he even a good linguist? It seemed to me like the good points in his books were reworded Chomsky and the original stuff was meh at best. Or evo-pscyh influenced and therefore hugely problematic at best.

I guess the biggest problem I have with these panglossian status quo warriors like Pinker (and to a lesser extent Hans Rosling) is that they pretty much ignore capitalism and climate change. They're apologists for capitalism and eternal growth and that's just not sustainable in a system like The Earth that has limits. And when climate change is the biggest problem we have, it is incredibly naive to be so tech optimistic in everything while not looking at the elephant in the room. Or the two elephants in the room since I'm a filthy anarcho-socialist so capitalism itself is IMO a dangerous idea and I can't see a way to battle global warming without getting rid of capitalism itself. Which is why we're doomed. "It's easier to imagine the end of the world itself that the end of capitalism," as that famous quote goes.

Personally I prefer Rosling's optimistic panglossian musings because his statistics on population growth and life expectancies and medical advances and literacy rates seem to be correct. I'm not so convinced by his economics or technology optimism. I'd err on the side of caution and cut down on fossil fuels rather than trust that technology will innovate itself out of the climate catastrophe facing us.

Pinker and Rosling and the like don't seem to care about inequality. They don't care that twenty odd people own the same wealth as the poorest half of the global population. They don't care that Bezos's wealth could end world hunger. They don't care that we grow enough food to feed 10 billion people already while there are only 7,8 billion people on earth - and that at the same time a billion people go to bed hungry every night and millions die every year of malnutrition related issues.

And it is an undeniable fact that Rosling and Pinker are correct that the poorest make a certain percentage more per day than they used to in the past. But if they're still dying of hunger at pretty much the same rate, what comfort is that economic rise to them? The world isn't fair and it's unfair in ways that benefit me: this system we have now is only the best the world has ever seen if your like Pinker and Rosling and me - an extremely privileged white man born in to the "west" in the mid-late 20th century. For the rest of the world it's better in some ways but not better enough in others. Going to bed hungry today is better than dying of hunger a generation ago. Not dying of vaccine preventable diseases is better than dying. But still being hungry and the structure of society keeping you down forever is not exactly a system I'd be happy to be in. Oh wait, even as a privileged white man(?) that is where I'm in. Oh shit.
 
Whether or not one agrees with Pinker's argument about the Enlightenment being the cause of certain social improvements, it is just wrong to accuse him of Leibnizian quietism. He sees himself as a progressive, but he thinks that to improve, we need to recognize how we have achieved the improvements that we have achieved. The point of his argument is not how great things are but that Enlightenment reason is the basis of improvement and we should endorse it, Not attack it. As I said above, there is a long tradition of optimistic progressivism. Indeed, until the late 20th century, it was a cliche falsism of intellectual history that progressives were optimists while conservatives were hard eyed realists. Pinker is guilty of a lot of things, but being a conservative isn't one of them.
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Bezos's wealth could end world hunger
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Can you give me the non-underpants gnome explanation for how we're ending world hunger here? Is the idea that we keep the machinery of capitalism running until someone gets as rich as Jeff Bezos, then bop him on the head and take all his stuff? Or are we going with the "no billionaires rule" and making it so nobody's allowed to get that rich in the first place, in which case I'm a little confused where all that hunger-ending funding is supposed to come from?
 
It's a bit the proverbial choice between a smaller slice of the larger pie (capitalism) or a larger slice of the smaller pie (non-capitalism), and whether the choice should be made on moral or economic grounds. What is best for you will depend on who you are, hence the notion of class struggle.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Bezos's wealth could end world hunger
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Can you give me the non-underpants gnome explanation for how we're ending world hunger here? Is the idea that we keep the machinery of capitalism running until someone gets as rich as Jeff Bezos, then bop him on the head and take all his stuff? Or are we going with the "no billionaires rule" and making it so nobody's allowed to get that rich in the first place, in which case I'm a little confused where all that hunger-ending funding is supposed to come from?
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Otto was making claim about income inequality. In what sense is this not a gnome response to a gnome statement?
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
It's a bit the proverbial choice between a smaller slice of the larger pie (capitalism) or a larger slice of the smaller pie (non-capitalism), and whether the choice should be made on moral or economic grounds. What is best for you will depend on who you are, hence the notion of class struggle.
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My complaint about the French left is that it accepts this alternative. There's no point in redistributing wealth if you don't have some wealth to redistribute. We need policies that are both pro-growth and further just economic distribution of wealth. But this is far afield from even the thread drifted topic and I may be misinterpreting a loose remark.
 
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