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I've heard a lot of people say the arrow of causality goes the other way -- between globalization and automation, our society's struggling to provide enough job

by csense 9y ago

I've heard a lot of people say the arrow of causality goes the other way -- between globalization and automation, our society's struggling to provide enough jobs, so the unemployed turn to idleness, despair and drug use. Low interest rates are supposed to help, but for the most part they've just led to bidding wars for real estate and financial assets, instead of building new businesses and increasing payrolls. The 2016 US election is a sign of despair -- our politicians are seen as out-of-touch, barely acknowledging there is even a problem. You know it's bad if people are desperate enough that they're willing to vote for a guy like Donald Trump.

dv_dt 9y ago
Causality is a difficult debugging tool for control loops (and even worse in economic feedback networks). Even in a simple control loop, you can know every causal link among individual elements in the system, but it can still be difficult to establish the system cause of why it's going off kilter. In controls, there are at least known mathematical tools for well defined cases - but now expand that to a big worldwide, messy, interlocked feedback networks.. you can again correctly identify many individual causal links.. but be entirely wrong about what is actually driving parts of the system to breakdown. It makes addressing problems at that scale difficult because people tend to argue about individual causal links which are indeed related, but may not be the actual drivers.
rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago
This sums up my thoughts very well. I highly recommend reading Bernard Stiegler on this topic (e.g http://www.samkinsley.com/2016/06/28/how-to-survive-disruption-interview-with-bernard-stiegler-translation/ http://www.samkinsley.com/2016/06/28/how-to-survive-disrupti...) Unfortunately, little of his work is been translated into English yet, but Wikipedia has compiled a good list of articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler#Online_texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler#Online_texts. This might help too: http://www.samkinsley.com/2011/11/01/reading-bernard-stiegler/ http://www.samkinsley.com/2011/11/01/reading-bernard-stiegle... It's certainly anecdotal, but he started doing philosophy while serving a prison sentence (for armed robbery)
disease 9y ago
Here's a good counter-argument to your assertion that people voted for Trump out of economic despair: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-fir...

by csense 9y ago

dv_dt 9y ago

Causality is a difficult debugging tool for control loops (and even worse in economic feedback networks). Even in a simple control loop, you can know every causal link among individual elements in the system, but it can still be difficult to establish the system cause of why it's going off kilter. In controls, there are at least known mathematical tools for well defined cases - but now expand that to a big worldwide, messy, interlocked feedback networks.. you can again correctly identify many individual causal links.. but be entirely wrong about what is actually driving parts of the system to breakdown. It makes addressing problems at that scale difficult because people tend to argue about individual causal links which are indeed related, but may not be the actual drivers.

rcMgD2BwE72F 9y ago

This sums up my thoughts very well. I highly recommend reading Bernard Stiegler on this topic (e.g http://www.samkinsley.com/2016/06/28/how-to-survive-disruption-interview-with-bernard-stiegler-translation/ http://www.samkinsley.com/2016/06/28/how-to-survive-disrupti...) Unfortunately, little of his work is been translated into English yet, but Wikipedia has compiled a good list of articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler#Online_texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler#Online_texts. This might help too: http://www.samkinsley.com/2011/11/01/reading-bernard-stiegler/ http://www.samkinsley.com/2011/11/01/reading-bernard-stiegle... It's certainly anecdotal, but he started doing philosophy while serving a prison sentence (for armed robbery)

disease 9y ago

Here's a good counter-argument to your assertion that people voted for Trump out of economic despair: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-fir...