13 ms·

Aaron Swartz’s Theory on How to Save the World

224 points by ghosh 10y ago

jokoon 10y ago
Sounds like electing Trump is one of those "out-corrupt the corrupters" strategies. Not sure if I'm right. EDIT: anyway I don't really agree with those theories, I would not base my political science out of comics, but I found the similarity odd.
- yarauuta 10y ago
  It must be wrong because the example came from a comic. Fuck logic.
  - jokoon 10y ago
    Fiction is often what we want to see, not reality.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  Then who is Batman?
  - jokoon 10y ago
    Anon
aaron-lebo 10y ago
I don't know anything about the guy other than having used Infogami (underrated) and followed early Reddit, but Swartz was always a brilliant but troubled guy. He was very intelligent but also just a kid, figuring things out in his own life while the tech world figured itself out. What happened to him was a tragedy, but Swartz engaged in illegal activity and found out his opponent was a lot more committed and effective than he anticipated. Unless he became Mandela in prison that wasn't an effective strategy. In his essay, Swartz strongly supported the Joker’s policy platform. Although the Joker presents himself to the world as a deranged and murderous clown, Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus,” a supremely rational actor, the character who best understands both the problems facing Gotham City and the best solutions to those problems. Batman might have had better gear and Harvey Dent might have had the public’s sympathy—but the Joker understood game theory, the best weapon of all. Though the Joker’s methods—such as burning large piles of money and blowing up hospitals—might have been controversial, the logic behind them was sound. “And the crazy thing is that it works!” Swartz enthused. Not only did the Joker end up ridding the city of organized crime, he convinced Gotham’s residents to re-evaluate their world and their roles in it. “The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain,” Swartz wrote, “but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero.” This is absurd (at least how it is portrayed by the author). In Nolan's movie the Joker is never portrayed as anything but a contradictory psycopath who engages in torture killings and according to his own words has no plans. He's a "dog chasing cars", even if that behavior was still rational. What solution did the Joker have again? The author closes with it, as though it's profound, but it's really just a screwed up view of justice that isn't even supported by the movie. In his working paper, Swartz described his new plan for the future of activism. Rather than form a political action group focused on one single issue or tactic, Swartz proposed that organizers should assemble groups of people supremely competent in certain relevant disciplines — investigators, activists, lawyers, lobbyists, policy experts, political strategists, journalists, and publicists — who could combine their efforts and advocate effectively for any issue, big or small. Swartz envisioned a flexible, intelligent, multifaceted task force that would learn from its mistakes and refine its tactics accordingly: a team of specialists that, cumulatively, worked as generalists. From a practical standpoint, this is interesting, though it sounds ripe for abuse and mob justice. How different is it from Wikileaks or even Anonymous? Isn't the problem with such a system is everyone always thinks they are the good guys? Just please stop with the psychohistory and hagiography. Stop trying to say what Swartz was thinking (the author does this throughout). You don't know. If you want to compete with reality you have to be realistic. Stop using his persona to support vague notions of how the world works.
- aloisdg 10y ago
  typo I guess: "What happened to him was a tragedy"
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    It was a travesty of justice, too, but tragedy is more appropriate.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > From a practical standpoint, this is interesting, though it sounds ripe for abuse and mob justice. How different is it from Wikileaks or even Anonymous? Isn't the problem with such a system is everyone always thinks they are the good guys? I'm wary of such universal teams which abstract away their own raison d'être. This is what gave us the modern - how I like to call them - toilet paper companies, i.e. companies which couldn't give a rat's ass about what they're making, as long as it is profitable (and that would gladly switch from building medical devices to making toilet paper if that had better ROI - hence the name). I can't deny such focus on gaming the structure is effective - much like MBAs with abstract knowledge of how to run a money-making machine are effective at doing just that - to the detriment of all customers, who actually care about the products.
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    A PoliSci professor just released a political theory book called "Marx's Inferno" (the thesis is that Marx structured Capital like Dante's journey through hell in The Divine Comedy). It's very coherent with the thoughts you're voicing here. It's also a re-visit of Marx's theories in general. One of my interpretations: if the invisible hand of the market describes the powerful ability of markets to turn self-interested actors into producing general welfare improvements by competing: cutting costs, producing innovation, etc. Then, the invisible hand of the market must obviously have the same impact on good outliers. If you are trying to do something evil beyond what the market will bear, you're out of luck. If you're trying to do something good beyond what the market will bear, though, you're just as out of luck. He goes very in depth into the fact that expressing our desires via revealed preferences in exchange/commerce removes a lot of our ability to voice what is exactly what we want.
pieter1976 10y ago
I have never understood the raising up of Aaron Swartz to demi-god status by this community. It is tragic that he took his own life and I fully expect to be downvoted here for expressing this opinion as it is a thing you can't say here (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html).
- Hermel 10y ago
  You can't deny that he took a persomal risk for the greater good, namely the free dissemination of public knowledge. And that's basically the definition of heroic.
  - keymone 10y ago
    who's denying he took the risk?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Sci-Hub did a better job of making knowledge available What he did was inconsequential and then he preferred to quit rather than face the consequences (to which he would probably get support from the whole internet) A.S. looks like more than a prankster who never got told that actions have consequences and an idealist that was too naive for his own good.
    - cooper12 10y ago
      Saying that he merely "quit", like he just walked out of the room or something, extremely trivializes depression and suicide. Also, the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages, and the prosecutor wanting to make an examples of him. Lastly your whole comment is framed as a personal attack. You say "inconsequential" even though we have no clue what he was planning to do since he was made to delete the files, and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR. I recommend instead that you instead try to read a little about him, he accomplished much more then you gave him credit for.
pella 10y ago
>Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus, a supremely rational actor ... arXiv:1103.3257: The Joker effect: cooperation driven by destructive agents (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257 https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257 Keywords: public goods, cooperation, destructive agents, cycles Abstract: "Understanding the emergence of cooperation is a central issue in evolutionary game theory. The hardest setup for the attainment of cooperation in a population of individuals is the Public Goods game in which cooperative agents generate a common good at their own expenses, while defectors "free-ride" this good. Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. Previous results have shown that introducing reputation, allowing for volunteer participation, punishing defectors, rewarding cooperators or structuring agents, can enhance cooperation. Here we present a model which shows how the introduction of rare, malicious agents -that we term jokers- performing just destructive actions on the other agents induce bursts of cooperation. The appearance of jokers promotes a rock-paper-scissors dynamics, where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation."
- pella 10y ago
  direct pdf link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf original publication: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311001639 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311...
- paganel 10y ago
  I've been thinking about this subject of "cooperation" for the last couple of days (also thanks in part to some links which made it to the front page of HN), and I have something to say about this: > Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. (...) where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation." I'd day that this culture of cooperation for defeating "jokers "doesn't apply to all cultures. It certainly doesn't apply to mine (somewhere in SE-Europe, on the fringe of the Balkans), where a realistic similar scenario would look somth like this: > Joker does his bad stuff, he shares some of his spoils with his relatives and very close acquaintances (god-fathers, god-sons etc.). These latter people are also part of the community that supposedly should cooperate in annihilating the Joker. Is fair to say that they won't. You've now got a fractured community, with some of its members (the Joker's friends and relatives) having no interest in "cooperation", and more importantly having the economical and power-related means of silencing the part of the community that would want to seek justice (because when you do bad stuff you usually do it in order to increase your economical and power-standing among your community). The Joker becomes an example for other people who see that doing nasty stuff supposedly pays off if you've got enough people by your side. Rinse and repeat. Aaron Swartz's theory is easier to implement where the Joker is an external element of the community, think immigrants, Jews in early 20-th century Europe, Armenians in late-Ottoman times etc, and I'd say that he's right, those communities actually got a lot more cohesive in chasing out the foreign Joker-like actor(s).
allenleein 10y ago
First: free information Quotes from Aaron Swartz: Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. From:https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Aaron Swartz seemed to not know how the world actually worked. It isn't a bunch of rational actors that love tech and information. Quite the opposite. One can't save the world without first diving deep into how it works. One then realizes there's stuff they can and can't change on top of lots of biases and trends in responses. Then, one builds on those elements of human nature to focus on the things they can change. He didn't do that. Instead, he focused on what can't be changed by committing an illegal act with hope it would be meaningful to society or courts. The result was that he killed himself after that failed catastrophically. We might learn a great deal from Aaron Swarts but not how to change the world. He's the least qualified to tell us about that because it appears he never understood it to begin with. Instead, we can just learn from and remember the good things he did that his mind was uniquely capable of doing. He has quite a resume of that. This approach is honest and gives him due credit.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  Funny, under the excuse that they're "[d]iving deep into how it works", tons of people do absolutely nothing other than become wealthy and give their kids as many breaks as possible, while giving excuses to not acting in any way. I hear it often called "being a realist". I consider it a pretty evil self-reassuring meme of our times. We're ready to believe we can go to Mars and live forever, but anyone fighting "Human Nature" (read: our current economical and political arrangement) is a fool. "Don't be naive, we've figured human nature out. It wants malls and 60 hour work-weeks!"
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Re become wealthy. I was thinking of Andrew Carnegie when trying for an example of young man who understood the world, got people, and changed it. For himself as you said. That's incidental, though, as s the methods are neutral to the end goal. Re being realist. It means you need to understand the context you operate in before you can change it. All the successful people did. Most failures that werent just bad luck didnt. The very example you gave about work weeks was improved by realists in various businesses who wanted it and could execute it within a sustainable model.
tps5 10y ago
The argument about "the Joker being the hero" reminds me of a Borges short story, "Three versions of Judas." In the story, Borges recounts a (fictional) theologian's slow realization that, in the New Testament story, it was Judas rather than Jesus who made the greatest sacrifice. Following this argument, this theologian eventually comes to the conclusion that Judas was the incarnation of God, not Jesus. Without Judas, he argues, the redemption of Man could not have occurred. Unsurprisingly, the Church doesn't like this version of the story and Borges' fictional theologian dies in anonymity.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  >Unsurprisingly, the Church doesn't like this version of the story and Borges' fictional theologian dies in anonymity. A diversion: Judas is the representation of one of the great dividers in Christianity. To forgive Judas is to deny free will. One of the things that one could take away from the gospels is that choices were made a consequences occurred. If it hadn't been Judas it would have been Peter, and so on. Judas was not acting as an agent. Catholics believe in free will and they believe in punishment (penance, purgatory, etc.). Luther, and many protestant sects, do not believe in free will as such. Either is there is no free will, or if there is, forgiveness more or less wipes it out. The reason I mention this is that I can really see the influence of protestant thinking in Western society. The tendency to look at all actors as part of a larger "system" rather than individuals with agency that may or may not deserve punishment or reward based strictly on their merit. I find that interesting given this discussion. There's acknowledgment of dealing with individual choices, but as part of creating an optimal systemic outcome. EDIT: This is also one of the reasons studying literature is an important effort. It gives us something of a window into a cultural world view. Here I'm reminded of the Iliad. Our tendency today is to admire Hector, but the Greeks would not have. He was part of a city and that city had sinned. There are no individuals. Fatalism is strong in Greek literature. It doesn't matter how good or bad a person you are.
digi_owl 10y ago
That has to be the single most weird take on the Joker character in ages... BTW, homo economicus is the single most dangerous concept that has come out of the "science" of economics.
ommunist 10y ago
Actually modern developments technically allow bot activism. If a legal bot can resolve your legal case, or (legalrobot for instance) can review your contract, why not to give bots power to represent your points and tirelessly petition?

224 points by ghosh 10y ago

Sounds like electing Trump is one of those "out-corrupt the corrupters" strategies. Not sure if I'm right. EDIT: anyway I don't really agree with those theories, I would not base my political science out of comics, but I found the similarity odd.

yarauuta 10y ago
It must be wrong because the example came from a comic. Fuck logic.
- jokoon 10y ago
  Fiction is often what we want to see, not reality.
akhilcacharya 10y ago
Then who is Batman?
- jokoon 10y ago
  Anon

aaron-lebo 10y ago

I don't know anything about the guy other than having used Infogami (underrated) and followed early Reddit, but Swartz was always a brilliant but troubled guy. He was very intelligent but also just a kid, figuring things out in his own life while the tech world figured itself out. What happened to him was a tragedy, but Swartz engaged in illegal activity and found out his opponent was a lot more committed and effective than he anticipated. Unless he became Mandela in prison that wasn't an effective strategy. In his essay, Swartz strongly supported the Joker’s policy platform. Although the Joker presents himself to the world as a deranged and murderous clown, Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus,” a supremely rational actor, the character who best understands both the problems facing Gotham City and the best solutions to those problems. Batman might have had better gear and Harvey Dent might have had the public’s sympathy—but the Joker understood game theory, the best weapon of all. Though the Joker’s methods—such as burning large piles of money and blowing up hospitals—might have been controversial, the logic behind them was sound. “And the crazy thing is that it works!” Swartz enthused. Not only did the Joker end up ridding the city of organized crime, he convinced Gotham’s residents to re-evaluate their world and their roles in it. “The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain,” Swartz wrote, “but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero.” This is absurd (at least how it is portrayed by the author). In Nolan's movie the Joker is never portrayed as anything but a contradictory psycopath who engages in torture killings and according to his own words has no plans. He's a "dog chasing cars", even if that behavior was still rational. What solution did the Joker have again? The author closes with it, as though it's profound, but it's really just a screwed up view of justice that isn't even supported by the movie. In his working paper, Swartz described his new plan for the future of activism. Rather than form a political action group focused on one single issue or tactic, Swartz proposed that organizers should assemble groups of people supremely competent in certain relevant disciplines — investigators, activists, lawyers, lobbyists, policy experts, political strategists, journalists, and publicists — who could combine their efforts and advocate effectively for any issue, big or small. Swartz envisioned a flexible, intelligent, multifaceted task force that would learn from its mistakes and refine its tactics accordingly: a team of specialists that, cumulatively, worked as generalists. From a practical standpoint, this is interesting, though it sounds ripe for abuse and mob justice. How different is it from Wikileaks or even Anonymous? Isn't the problem with such a system is everyone always thinks they are the good guys? Just please stop with the psychohistory and hagiography. Stop trying to say what Swartz was thinking (the author does this throughout). You don't know. If you want to compete with reality you have to be realistic. Stop using his persona to support vague notions of how the world works.

aloisdg 10y ago
typo I guess: "What happened to him was a tragedy"
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  It was a travesty of justice, too, but tragedy is more appropriate.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> From a practical standpoint, this is interesting, though it sounds ripe for abuse and mob justice. How different is it from Wikileaks or even Anonymous? Isn't the problem with such a system is everyone always thinks they are the good guys? I'm wary of such universal teams which abstract away their own raison d'être. This is what gave us the modern - how I like to call them - toilet paper companies, i.e. companies which couldn't give a rat's ass about what they're making, as long as it is profitable (and that would gladly switch from building medical devices to making toilet paper if that had better ROI - hence the name). I can't deny such focus on gaming the structure is effective - much like MBAs with abstract knowledge of how to run a money-making machine are effective at doing just that - to the detriment of all customers, who actually care about the products.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  A PoliSci professor just released a political theory book called "Marx's Inferno" (the thesis is that Marx structured Capital like Dante's journey through hell in The Divine Comedy). It's very coherent with the thoughts you're voicing here. It's also a re-visit of Marx's theories in general. One of my interpretations: if the invisible hand of the market describes the powerful ability of markets to turn self-interested actors into producing general welfare improvements by competing: cutting costs, producing innovation, etc. Then, the invisible hand of the market must obviously have the same impact on good outliers. If you are trying to do something evil beyond what the market will bear, you're out of luck. If you're trying to do something good beyond what the market will bear, though, you're just as out of luck. He goes very in depth into the fact that expressing our desires via revealed preferences in exchange/commerce removes a lot of our ability to voice what is exactly what we want.

pieter1976 10y ago

I have never understood the raising up of Aaron Swartz to demi-god status by this community. It is tragic that he took his own life and I fully expect to be downvoted here for expressing this opinion as it is a thing you can't say here (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html).

Hermel 10y ago
You can't deny that he took a persomal risk for the greater good, namely the free dissemination of public knowledge. And that's basically the definition of heroic.
- keymone 10y ago
  who's denying he took the risk?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Sci-Hub did a better job of making knowledge available What he did was inconsequential and then he preferred to quit rather than face the consequences (to which he would probably get support from the whole internet) A.S. looks like more than a prankster who never got told that actions have consequences and an idealist that was too naive for his own good.
  - cooper12 10y ago
    Saying that he merely "quit", like he just walked out of the room or something, extremely trivializes depression and suicide. Also, the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages, and the prosecutor wanting to make an examples of him. Lastly your whole comment is framed as a personal attack. You say "inconsequential" even though we have no clue what he was planning to do since he was made to delete the files, and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR. I recommend instead that you instead try to read a little about him, he accomplished much more then you gave him credit for.

pella 10y ago

>Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus, a supremely rational actor ... arXiv:1103.3257: The Joker effect: cooperation driven by destructive agents (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257 https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3257 Keywords: public goods, cooperation, destructive agents, cycles Abstract: "Understanding the emergence of cooperation is a central issue in evolutionary game theory. The hardest setup for the attainment of cooperation in a population of individuals is the Public Goods game in which cooperative agents generate a common good at their own expenses, while defectors "free-ride" this good. Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. Previous results have shown that introducing reputation, allowing for volunteer participation, punishing defectors, rewarding cooperators or structuring agents, can enhance cooperation. Here we present a model which shows how the introduction of rare, malicious agents -that we term jokers- performing just destructive actions on the other agents induce bursts of cooperation. The appearance of jokers promotes a rock-paper-scissors dynamics, where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation."

pella 10y ago
direct pdf link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3257v1.pdf original publication: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311001639 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519311...
paganel 10y ago
I've been thinking about this subject of "cooperation" for the last couple of days (also thanks in part to some links which made it to the front page of HN), and I have something to say about this: > Eventually this causes the exhaustion of the good, a situation which is bad for everybody. (...) where jokers outbeat defectors and cooperators outperform jokers, which are subsequently invaded by defectors. Thus, paradoxically, the existence of destructive agents acting indiscriminately promotes cooperation." I'd day that this culture of cooperation for defeating "jokers "doesn't apply to all cultures. It certainly doesn't apply to mine (somewhere in SE-Europe, on the fringe of the Balkans), where a realistic similar scenario would look somth like this: > Joker does his bad stuff, he shares some of his spoils with his relatives and very close acquaintances (god-fathers, god-sons etc.). These latter people are also part of the community that supposedly should cooperate in annihilating the Joker. Is fair to say that they won't. You've now got a fractured community, with some of its members (the Joker's friends and relatives) having no interest in "cooperation", and more importantly having the economical and power-related means of silencing the part of the community that would want to seek justice (because when you do bad stuff you usually do it in order to increase your economical and power-standing among your community). The Joker becomes an example for other people who see that doing nasty stuff supposedly pays off if you've got enough people by your side. Rinse and repeat. Aaron Swartz's theory is easier to implement where the Joker is an external element of the community, think immigrants, Jews in early 20-th century Europe, Armenians in late-Ottoman times etc, and I'd say that he's right, those communities actually got a lot more cohesive in chasing out the foreign Joker-like actor(s).

allenleein 10y ago

First: free information Quotes from Aaron Swartz: Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. From:https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Aaron Swartz seemed to not know how the world actually worked. It isn't a bunch of rational actors that love tech and information. Quite the opposite. One can't save the world without first diving deep into how it works. One then realizes there's stuff they can and can't change on top of lots of biases and trends in responses. Then, one builds on those elements of human nature to focus on the things they can change. He didn't do that. Instead, he focused on what can't be changed by committing an illegal act with hope it would be meaningful to society or courts. The result was that he killed himself after that failed catastrophically. We might learn a great deal from Aaron Swarts but not how to change the world. He's the least qualified to tell us about that because it appears he never understood it to begin with. Instead, we can just learn from and remember the good things he did that his mind was uniquely capable of doing. He has quite a resume of that. This approach is honest and gives him due credit.

RodericDay 10y ago
Funny, under the excuse that they're "[d]iving deep into how it works", tons of people do absolutely nothing other than become wealthy and give their kids as many breaks as possible, while giving excuses to not acting in any way. I hear it often called "being a realist". I consider it a pretty evil self-reassuring meme of our times. We're ready to believe we can go to Mars and live forever, but anyone fighting "Human Nature" (read: our current economical and political arrangement) is a fool. "Don't be naive, we've figured human nature out. It wants malls and 60 hour work-weeks!"
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Re become wealthy. I was thinking of Andrew Carnegie when trying for an example of young man who understood the world, got people, and changed it. For himself as you said. That's incidental, though, as s the methods are neutral to the end goal. Re being realist. It means you need to understand the context you operate in before you can change it. All the successful people did. Most failures that werent just bad luck didnt. The very example you gave about work weeks was improved by realists in various businesses who wanted it and could execute it within a sustainable model.

tps5 10y ago

The argument about "the Joker being the hero" reminds me of a Borges short story, "Three versions of Judas." In the story, Borges recounts a (fictional) theologian's slow realization that, in the New Testament story, it was Judas rather than Jesus who made the greatest sacrifice. Following this argument, this theologian eventually comes to the conclusion that Judas was the incarnation of God, not Jesus. Without Judas, he argues, the redemption of Man could not have occurred. Unsurprisingly, the Church doesn't like this version of the story and Borges' fictional theologian dies in anonymity.

stinkytaco 10y ago
>Unsurprisingly, the Church doesn't like this version of the story and Borges' fictional theologian dies in anonymity. A diversion: Judas is the representation of one of the great dividers in Christianity. To forgive Judas is to deny free will. One of the things that one could take away from the gospels is that choices were made a consequences occurred. If it hadn't been Judas it would have been Peter, and so on. Judas was not acting as an agent. Catholics believe in free will and they believe in punishment (penance, purgatory, etc.). Luther, and many protestant sects, do not believe in free will as such. Either is there is no free will, or if there is, forgiveness more or less wipes it out. The reason I mention this is that I can really see the influence of protestant thinking in Western society. The tendency to look at all actors as part of a larger "system" rather than individuals with agency that may or may not deserve punishment or reward based strictly on their merit. I find that interesting given this discussion. There's acknowledgment of dealing with individual choices, but as part of creating an optimal systemic outcome. EDIT: This is also one of the reasons studying literature is an important effort. It gives us something of a window into a cultural world view. Here I'm reminded of the Iliad. Our tendency today is to admire Hector, but the Greeks would not have. He was part of a city and that city had sinned. There are no individuals. Fatalism is strong in Greek literature. It doesn't matter how good or bad a person you are.

digi_owl 10y ago

That has to be the single most weird take on the Joker character in ages... BTW, homo economicus is the single most dangerous concept that has come out of the "science" of economics.

ommunist 10y ago

Actually modern developments technically allow bot activism. If a legal bot can resolve your legal case, or (legalrobot for instance) can review your contract, why not to give bots power to represent your points and tirelessly petition?