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You hit on some good points and it spurred my thought to his definition of grey. To have a concept of grey you really need a black and a white. You need to defi

You hit on some good points and it spurred my thought to his definition of grey. To have a concept of grey you really need a black and a white. You need to define the polls of your continuum. That implies some set of functions that transforms over the continuum. Compared to defining your polls and choosing your transformation functions .... I'm not sure selecting one grey over another really has the same impact. For some reason this makes me think of Hegel and dialectical (subjects I have limited understanding of). I also agree that quantitative reasoning has usurped qualitative reasoning and this might be due to quantitative reasoning actually being easier. If you define a scale with which to measure then it is really just a matter of defining how you score something, gathering the inputs and turning a crank to get to an answer. IMO, choosing the scale (and maybe to a less extent the scoring mechanism) seems to be the truly difficult part of the puzzle.

abernard1 7y ago
What exactly would the quantitative "score" be to measure between the qualitative systems of Capitalism and Socialism? Between Buddhism and Christianity? Between Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory? I would submit there isn't one. Furthermore any objective "facts" useful for such a metric have some basis on one theory or interpretation or another. The article says: > This is why quantitative and scale-based thinking is so important. But most don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math; it’s about the idea that The dose makes the poison. To adopt their words in response to your comment, what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems? Could one have identical numerical "doses" in different combinations of those systems? It's a useless, reductionist, and counterproductive way of thinking in my opinion.
- mnowicki 7y ago
  > What exactly would the quantitative "score" be to measure between the qualitative systems of Capitalism and Socialism? Between Buddhism and Christianity? Between Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory? The depends on the question. You can compare Buddhism and Christianity in many ways, each with their own score. Are you saying 'which one is better for humanity'? Or 'which one will make my stoner friends think I'm rad?'? if you were to compare which one has done more good/bad for humanity, than the score would be how much good or bad each one has done for humanity. You may say Buddhism improves the lives of it's adherents about twice as much as christianity on average. But Christianity has 20x as many adherents. But but Christianity is responsible for 10000x more deaths... etc. Then you just need to decide on the value of 'improving a persons life X amount' compared to 'killing X number of people' and do the math. Of course, you typically don't get to the level of assigning numerical values to human life when forming your opinions most of the time. That's just the explanation of how these things are quantitatively 'scored' to try and answer your question - in practice it's a much more guesstimation-based system.
- reggieband 7y ago
  > What exactly would the quantitative "score" be to measure between the qualitative systems of Capitalism and Socialism? Well, isn't this exactly what people try to do when comparing these systems? Number of deaths, number of people in poverty, number of products on the shelves in stores? > Between Buddhism and Christianity? You can count the number of atrocities perpetrated by each. The number of scandals involving their priests. The total number of adherents. > what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems? That is the whole point of my post. Defining how to turn a qualitative measure into a quantitate measure is the real and only trick. I chose some arbitrary ones in response to your examples. You may choose different ones. Maybe you choose to measure capitalism and socialism based on some psychological happiness score defined as responses to some survey. Maybe you measure it by GDP. Choosing your measure is the real power.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >Well, isn't this exactly what people try to do when comparing these systems? Number of deaths, number of people in poverty, number of products on the shelves in stores? Not necessarily. Qualitative models have been increasingly adopted, and most arguments from the socialist side of the debate concede that capitalism has greatly improved quantitatively measured standards of living, it is responsible for a huge range of products, and that 20th c. socialism lead to many deaths. Qualitative criticisms are the most popular today in political economy, namely, the work of Sen, Roemer, Vrousalis and others on qualitative (with some quantitative basis) concepts of "exploitation", "domination", "alienation", and "fetishism". Nevertheless, quantitative arguments are also abound, in particular debate over what classifies as "poverty", and the transformation of values to prices of production (usually formulated mathematically). The road to defining axiomitically concepts like "exploitation" still has "a million miles to go" (Veneziani and Yoshihara). This area of criticism, in my opinion (and the opinion of Honkanen[0]), needs more quantitative reasoning, and qualitative thinking cannot simply brush aside the use of statistics, which is relevant in many (but not all) instances. [0] Honkanen P. (2020) The Transformation Problem and Value-Form: Methodological Comments. In: Silver M. (eds) Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
    - 7y ago
- abernard1 7y ago
  "You can count the number of atrocities perpetrated by each. The number of scandals involving their priests. The total number of adherents." Yes, but these would be statistics (subjectively determined and presupposing a set of values I might add) to determine whether one or another ideas were better than one another, and in what way. The grey thinking in this article is just one big ideological blender. It implies that if we had A X Capitalism and (1-A) X Socialism, maybe that would be a sensical or desirable outcome. It does not say in any way how that is a coherent thing, either for those two specific models, or for models in general.

abernard1 7y ago

What exactly would the quantitative "score" be to measure between the qualitative systems of Capitalism and Socialism? Between Buddhism and Christianity? Between Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory? I would submit there isn't one. Furthermore any objective "facts" useful for such a metric have some basis on one theory or interpretation or another. The article says: > This is why quantitative and scale-based thinking is so important. But most don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math; it’s about the idea that The dose makes the poison. To adopt their words in response to your comment, what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems? Could one have identical numerical "doses" in different combinations of those systems? It's a useless, reductionist, and counterproductive way of thinking in my opinion.

mnowicki 7y ago
> What exactly would the quantitative "score" be to measure between the qualitative systems of Capitalism and Socialism? Between Buddhism and Christianity? Between Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory? The depends on the question. You can compare Buddhism and Christianity in many ways, each with their own score. Are you saying 'which one is better for humanity'? Or 'which one will make my stoner friends think I'm rad?'? if you were to compare which one has done more good/bad for humanity, than the score would be how much good or bad each one has done for humanity. You may say Buddhism improves the lives of it's adherents about twice as much as christianity on average. But Christianity has 20x as many adherents. But but Christianity is responsible for 10000x more deaths... etc. Then you just need to decide on the value of 'improving a persons life X amount' compared to 'killing X number of people' and do the math. Of course, you typically don't get to the level of assigning numerical values to human life when forming your opinions most of the time. That's just the explanation of how these things are quantitatively 'scored' to try and answer your question - in practice it's a much more guesstimation-based system.
reggieband 7y ago
> What exactly would the quantitative "score" be to measure between the qualitative systems of Capitalism and Socialism? Well, isn't this exactly what people try to do when comparing these systems? Number of deaths, number of people in poverty, number of products on the shelves in stores? > Between Buddhism and Christianity? You can count the number of atrocities perpetrated by each. The number of scandals involving their priests. The total number of adherents. > what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems? That is the whole point of my post. Defining how to turn a qualitative measure into a quantitate measure is the real and only trick. I chose some arbitrary ones in response to your examples. You may choose different ones. Maybe you choose to measure capitalism and socialism based on some psychological happiness score defined as responses to some survey. Maybe you measure it by GDP. Choosing your measure is the real power.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >Well, isn't this exactly what people try to do when comparing these systems? Number of deaths, number of people in poverty, number of products on the shelves in stores? Not necessarily. Qualitative models have been increasingly adopted, and most arguments from the socialist side of the debate concede that capitalism has greatly improved quantitatively measured standards of living, it is responsible for a huge range of products, and that 20th c. socialism lead to many deaths. Qualitative criticisms are the most popular today in political economy, namely, the work of Sen, Roemer, Vrousalis and others on qualitative (with some quantitative basis) concepts of "exploitation", "domination", "alienation", and "fetishism". Nevertheless, quantitative arguments are also abound, in particular debate over what classifies as "poverty", and the transformation of values to prices of production (usually formulated mathematically). The road to defining axiomitically concepts like "exploitation" still has "a million miles to go" (Veneziani and Yoshihara). This area of criticism, in my opinion (and the opinion of Honkanen[0]), needs more quantitative reasoning, and qualitative thinking cannot simply brush aside the use of statistics, which is relevant in many (but not all) instances. [0] Honkanen P. (2020) The Transformation Problem and Value-Form: Methodological Comments. In: Silver M. (eds) Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
  - 7y ago
abernard1 7y ago
"You can count the number of atrocities perpetrated by each. The number of scandals involving their priests. The total number of adherents." Yes, but these would be statistics (subjectively determined and presupposing a set of values I might add) to determine whether one or another ideas were better than one another, and in what way. The grey thinking in this article is just one big ideological blender. It implies that if we had A X Capitalism and (1-A) X Socialism, maybe that would be a sensical or desirable outcome. It does not say in any way how that is a coherent thing, either for those two specific models, or for models in general.