4 ms·
It's very well written, but also it's bullshit. The basic argument is "I, a biologist, know a lot about how animals need to be different sizes, therefore I als
by earthboundkid 3y ago
It's very well written, but also it's bullshit.
The basic argument is "I, a biologist, know a lot about how animals need to be different sizes, therefore I also know about whether socialism or democracy or whatever is a good idea now." When you write it out like that, it's very clearly a bullshit argument that relies on appeal to authority, but because the essay is well written, it just comes across as logical and commonsense when you read it.
- j7ake 3y agoHe did not say whether socialism is better versus democracy. He said human institutions have an optimum size. An institution or system that works at small scale is not guaranteed to work at large. That is not common sense, and in fact many contemporary people believe in scale-free properties of institutions, which have led to catastrophic failures (eg large interconnected banks that all fail together).
- earthboundkid 3y agoI'm not even saying he's wrong. I'm saying the whole structure of the argument is bullshit, but it's really good rhetoric, so you don't notice it. The argument is an extended analogy between biological systems and society, and the analogy cannot bear the weight placed on it. In the end, the conclusion he makes might be correct or not, but if it is correct, its correctness is not correlated with the argument he makes for it.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoThere is no need to insist in separating ideas about biology from ideas about society. The two are intimately connected. Studying something like political science is really a study of animal behavior.
- earthboundkid 3y agoBut he’s not a sociologist. The stuff about animals is stuff he studied. The stuff about society is just him spitballing.
- pwndByDeath 3y agoMaybe sociologists could benefit from a biologist mentor?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Turskarama 3y agoThere is no reason to think it's a bad analogy, and in fact it seems obviously true. All you need to do is look through history to see that larger empires have more complex bureaucracies. In a village all you need is an elder, in a country even a dictator needs teams of accomplices to get anything done. Really the thing his argument gets wrong is that he says Socialism where I think what he actually means is Anarchy.
- dredmorbius 3y agoGeoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies: Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on.... Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work on cities and biological life to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=0899C2F4CD20BF73FC1E150B20B1D1D6 https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=0899C2F4CD20BF73FC1E150...>
- codeulike 3y agoYes exactly, it only switches to politics in the last paragraph. The point might be accurate but the evidence is sleight of hand from biological examples. Classic rhetoric, the sort of thing no one would pull you up for in 1926.