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"Where the rewards for merit are the greatest, that is where you will find the best citizens." --excerpt from The History of the Peloponnesian War I think it

by text70 6y ago

"Where the rewards for merit are the greatest, that is where you will find the best citizens." --excerpt from The History of the Peloponnesian War I think it boils down to what society rewards as merit. Reward a kid with millions from minecraft videos on youtube, while the Phd in Humanities, struggles to pay the bills is ripe for a culture of mistrust. While this is just a simple example, I think it illustrates how prioritizing and rewarding knowledge and talent, and the good aspects of a person, and a citizen, can lead to more cohesive, and better societies.

Nasrudith 6y ago
That doesn't seem to be an issue of trust so much as demonstrating that uncomfortably assumptions they "think are fair" should don't hold true at all. Skilled weavers may have thought their craft virtuous but they were throughly bested by cloth mills and vast automated of early industrialization. Sure those involved may feel screwed over but they never were betrayed - they just had wrong expectations that the world did not vindicate. It brings to mind a joke about the last Phrenology graduates before the field was disproven having the king of worthless degrees. Fundamentally the question in both cases is "Why should everyone else support them in their endeavors?" The kid has "because ads and views" financially and because people want to watch it. The PhD in Humanities implicitly lacks an audience, let alone a way to monetize it. What is knowledge? What is talent? If they aren't defined they could be trivially gamed. Epistemology ironically plays into it as well - how is the knowledge validated in any way? What separates a schizophrenic crackpot who believes that our brains are being kept in jars on the dark side of the moon from Aristotle's lauguably bad impetus physics of projectiles except history and how persuasive an essay is about them? Both are objextively wrong and don't contribute anything in themselves. If any configuration may be studied or composed regardless of validity and rewarded it encourages a "parasitism" of making up bullshit as the path of least resistance instead of anything remotely productive which is no good for a system which wants to sustain itself. Of course there are also many layered ironies in practical producitivty as a framework as opposed to abstract intellectual theory. Theory which "escapes" and proves useful tends to disrupt and utterly outdo the "productive" of old rendering the former practicioners living historic artifacts.

by text70 6y ago

Nasrudith 6y ago

That doesn't seem to be an issue of trust so much as demonstrating that uncomfortably assumptions they "think are fair" should don't hold true at all. Skilled weavers may have thought their craft virtuous but they were throughly bested by cloth mills and vast automated of early industrialization. Sure those involved may feel screwed over but they never were betrayed - they just had wrong expectations that the world did not vindicate. It brings to mind a joke about the last Phrenology graduates before the field was disproven having the king of worthless degrees. Fundamentally the question in both cases is "Why should everyone else support them in their endeavors?" The kid has "because ads and views" financially and because people want to watch it. The PhD in Humanities implicitly lacks an audience, let alone a way to monetize it. What is knowledge? What is talent? If they aren't defined they could be trivially gamed. Epistemology ironically plays into it as well - how is the knowledge validated in any way? What separates a schizophrenic crackpot who believes that our brains are being kept in jars on the dark side of the moon from Aristotle's lauguably bad impetus physics of projectiles except history and how persuasive an essay is about them? Both are objextively wrong and don't contribute anything in themselves. If any configuration may be studied or composed regardless of validity and rewarded it encourages a "parasitism" of making up bullshit as the path of least resistance instead of anything remotely productive which is no good for a system which wants to sustain itself. Of course there are also many layered ironies in practical producitivty as a framework as opposed to abstract intellectual theory. Theory which "escapes" and proves useful tends to disrupt and utterly outdo the "productive" of old rendering the former practicioners living historic artifacts.