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Skipping the "people types" nonsense, the "yes if" disconnected from reality assumption is the mark of an utopia, be it Platonic society or communism or extreme
by lngnmn 10y ago
Skipping the "people types" nonsense, the "yes if" disconnected from reality assumption is the mark of an utopia, be it Platonic society or communism or extreme liberalism, which is always based on some unrealistic "ifs" instead of taking into account "what is".
Evolutionary and social dynamics, caused by environmental constraints and necessary following competition for everything related to passing genes to a future generation, and so called human nature, which is, basically, the behavioral answer to these fundamental challenges, cannot be dismissed by any amount of empty hipster's "progressive" rhetoric, used to gain attention.
Any proposal should be viewed as a constraint-satisfaction problem against the closest possible approximation to the actual reality. This is the only valid approach - to perform reality checks first, and it is habit for a scientifically inclined, trained mind and almost unknown skill to hipsters obsessed with their feelings and abstract, based on disconnected from reality oversimplified views and theories, like that naive "ethical" philosophy based on theology, wrong premises and naive assumptions.
In other words, I did some simplest constraint-satisfaction checking, and the idea seem to fail to pass the first few fundamental social constraints. According to laws of logic, a single flaw is enough to destroy the whole thing. I found at least two.
- onion2k 10y agoAny proposal should be viewed as a constraint-satisfaction problem against the closest possible approximation to the actual reality. Sure, but with the understanding that "actual reality" is not some fixed point that can never be changed. You're saying that Indian people will always spend this money unwisely because that's what they do now and it's what they've always done. I'm saying that Indian people living in povery are intelligent and can understand a rational argument that basic income would be great for them if they use it well. People can change, especially if they're give the incentive of, say, free money.
- lngnmn 10y agoI have not said anything about people living in poverty. I only said that there exist an ancient tradition and related social norms, which are very real and very strong factors. Perhaps, I failed to emphasize, that in India the "social" is much stronger aspect than Western "personal success". In India it is about finding one's place in society, instead of outperforming everyone else. That is a fundamental difference. Even the decade of third-rate western satellite TV still failed to create a significant shift into western consumerism and obsession with the cosplay of success (and the cosplay of absent intelligence, which we call hipsterism). There are some converts, of course, but not that many.