4 ms·

That an electron is measured through its effect does not mean that we don't need to describe the electron itself. We certainly do. So look at what physicists d

That an electron is measured through its effect does not mean that we don't need to describe the electron itself. We certainly do. So look at what physicists did. First they came up with a clear definition - "a discrete and indivisible negatively charged particle". Second, they went out of their way to distinguish concepts like an electron from charge as a fluid and other models. They didn't simply declare "well, electric current proves electrons exist", they went to crazy lengths like Millikan's oil drops to distinguish these concepts. When they can't actually distinguish these concepts intrinsically (as was the case with Maxwell's equations vs Aether), they tend to drop the more complex theory. In contrast, you seem quite resistant to doing any of these things. I don't quite understand why.

pron 12y ago
Resistant to what? I just gave you a clear and concise definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will). The social sciences did all of the required work as well, I'm just unable to write a whole sociology book in HN comments. There have been countless studies in sociology, history, anthropology and psychology examining the different forms of power and how it works. But bear in mind that these sciences are much more complicated than physics; in fact they're intractable. The simplest social mechanism is more complicated than the gravitational interactions of 1 million bodies. Actually the example I’ve give of the electron is a rather weak one, as the electron is a very specific thing, while power is the most fundamental concept in all the social sciences except psychology (i.e. history, sociology, anthropology and political science). A better example — the obvious one, in fact — is energy. Energy can also only be measured through its effects, and yet it is a very fundamental concept. Describing it not as one thing but as disparate manifestations would take away its explaining power and many of our most useful models (I should really write a book called “social science for physicists”). I’ve also given more thought to your focus on individual rights. Individual rights are an obvious “good thing”, but here’s where they get complicated: When I think of individual rights I imagine a universe composed of mass but no force. Such a universe will be no more than a cloud of plasma. But in our universe, mass gives rise to force, and force creates the interesting interactions that have, in turn, created our world. Likewise, human society is not made of humans, but of human interaction, interaction gives rise to power, and power, by definition, restricts freedom. Now, this is not a bad thing necessarily, as, if you think about it, all cooperation is basically the voluntary yielding of freedom in order to concentrate power for some common goal that wouldn’t have otherwise been achievable. But that doesn’t change the fact that whether they like it or not, just as mass-ful particles induce force, humans induce power, and both force and power take away freedom from others. So saying something like “everyone should be free” makes little sense, as that is only possible in a plasma cloud. In order to grant freedom, freedom has to be compromised — based on some values — and then managed somehow. Obviously, different people will prefer different compromises. Personally, I’d either like to see all power restricted and controlled, or all power unrestricted (including physical violence). This is why I think that American libertarianism is either hypocritical or ignorant. It is either ignorant of the fact that there is no freedom without power (and hence, coercion), or hypocritical in calling for unrestrained use of certain forms of power alone (money) and not others (physical violence, preferably mediated by a democratic government that restrains the use of money). I was therefore delighted (intellectually, that is) to learn recently of a fringe Silicon Valley movement called neoreactionism or “Dark Enlightenment”, funded by Peter Thiel. These guys (few women would join that openly sexist, openly autistic movement) are probably all former libertarians that have discovered that there is no such thing as freedom from power, and now openly call for a tyranny. As someone who’d studied medieval history in graduate school (though I have never obtained my doctorate) I was delighted to see the movement’s leader, a programmer by the name of Curtis Yarvin, analyze some historical document and call for the return of feudalism (he complains that those documents are not studied by historians, which is true for the simple reason that they are false accounts). The problem with the return to feudalism — even if you were to believe the false accounts of how life was good then (it by no means was) — is that the power structure back then was at least held in check by technology, that is, lack thereof. With the invention of mass media and fast transportation, power can be more concentrated than ever before, which is why the greatest invention of Western civilization was the central government, which rose to contain and manage power (of course, this only made conflicts among those governments more violent than ever before, but that fear of annihilation reduced the number of conflicts considerably). BTW, the modern academic definition of politics is, not surprisingly, the management of power in society. Feudalism combined with modern technology has only been tried — to the best of my knowledge — once, in nineteenth century America. The US at the time had a very weak federal government with almost no regulation. The result was a period of extremely fast economic expansion but at great social cost: a large portion of the American population was enslaved in all by name by a very small number of slave-owners-in-all-by-name known as the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Stanford, JP Morgan, Frick, et al.). All options were taken from them — they couldn’t migrate (they were sometimes paid in company-issued currency, that was useless anywhere else) and couldn’t organize to concentrate power to improve their lot (in fact, they did organize, but the robber barons had private armies that killed the rabble rousers and intimidated everyone else). The people cried for help, and Theodore Roosevelt rescued them by creating federal regulation.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Energy is also well defined - for any particular case you'll be able to write down a precise formula defining it. For example, a system of colliding particles has E=sum(p^2/2m) (p is momentum, m is mass). If you want to make a claim that one system has more energy than another, testing that claim will be easy - just apply the formula. If you wanted me to take it seriously, you should have applied the power formula to figure out whether influencing college admissions officers > influencing police - all you did was scoff. I assert that your use of the word "power" is pointless. It transmits no information about the world, much like how you use privilege. Why do you insist on engaging in long discussions advocating the use of words that mean merely "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes"?
  - rmxt 12y ago
    Information can most certainly be conveyed outside the use of precise formulas, lest you think that entire fields of human endeavor are bunk (merely "long discussions"): art; music; aspects of philosophy, anthropology and sociology; etc. Nonetheless, I would posit that a number of quantifiable metrics contribute to pron's definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will), such as net worth, yearly earnings, spending patterns, education levels, employment statistics, and social network models, especially when these are considered over time. These "long discussions" that you show disdain for are attempting to introduce a semantic base on which "well defined" terms can be further developed and evaluated in light of new social experiences (e.g., the latest claims of * -ism in SV). pron has set out an extended metaphor, say, which is akin to describing how one would perform an oil drop experiment. That is the opposite of "resistance". Your assertion that "power" and "privilege" are semantically empty is completely without grounding. Just because the metaphoric equivalent of "applying the power formula" has been left as an exercise to the reader, does not mean that the terms of the equation are void of meaning.
  - pron 12y ago
    Power is also well defined (I have provided a definition which is not "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes") and in cases like this -- easy to measure. You may assert the last forty years of research are pointless. That it's definition applies in many cases (though not all -- an earthquake leveling a city isn't directly related to power) does not make it any less useful (just like energy is always involved in any interaction of particles). If you apply the definition, you will see that influencing college admissions officers << influencing police in this case. The fact that intractable interactions lend themselves less easily to formulations (let alone closed expressions) does not take away their reality or invalidate the model. Much of the work in applied mathematics (non-linear equations) is qualitative, as well. I think it is you who are resisting to admit that the past decades of research have taught us a lot about how society works.

pron 12y ago

Resistant to what? I just gave you a clear and concise definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will). The social sciences did all of the required work as well, I'm just unable to write a whole sociology book in HN comments. There have been countless studies in sociology, history, anthropology and psychology examining the different forms of power and how it works. But bear in mind that these sciences are much more complicated than physics; in fact they're intractable. The simplest social mechanism is more complicated than the gravitational interactions of 1 million bodies. Actually the example I’ve give of the electron is a rather weak one, as the electron is a very specific thing, while power is the most fundamental concept in all the social sciences except psychology (i.e. history, sociology, anthropology and political science). A better example — the obvious one, in fact — is energy. Energy can also only be measured through its effects, and yet it is a very fundamental concept. Describing it not as one thing but as disparate manifestations would take away its explaining power and many of our most useful models (I should really write a book called “social science for physicists”). I’ve also given more thought to your focus on individual rights. Individual rights are an obvious “good thing”, but here’s where they get complicated: When I think of individual rights I imagine a universe composed of mass but no force. Such a universe will be no more than a cloud of plasma. But in our universe, mass gives rise to force, and force creates the interesting interactions that have, in turn, created our world. Likewise, human society is not made of humans, but of human interaction, interaction gives rise to power, and power, by definition, restricts freedom. Now, this is not a bad thing necessarily, as, if you think about it, all cooperation is basically the voluntary yielding of freedom in order to concentrate power for some common goal that wouldn’t have otherwise been achievable. But that doesn’t change the fact that whether they like it or not, just as mass-ful particles induce force, humans induce power, and both force and power take away freedom from others. So saying something like “everyone should be free” makes little sense, as that is only possible in a plasma cloud. In order to grant freedom, freedom has to be compromised — based on some values — and then managed somehow. Obviously, different people will prefer different compromises. Personally, I’d either like to see all power restricted and controlled, or all power unrestricted (including physical violence). This is why I think that American libertarianism is either hypocritical or ignorant. It is either ignorant of the fact that there is no freedom without power (and hence, coercion), or hypocritical in calling for unrestrained use of certain forms of power alone (money) and not others (physical violence, preferably mediated by a democratic government that restrains the use of money). I was therefore delighted (intellectually, that is) to learn recently of a fringe Silicon Valley movement called neoreactionism or “Dark Enlightenment”, funded by Peter Thiel. These guys (few women would join that openly sexist, openly autistic movement) are probably all former libertarians that have discovered that there is no such thing as freedom from power, and now openly call for a tyranny. As someone who’d studied medieval history in graduate school (though I have never obtained my doctorate) I was delighted to see the movement’s leader, a programmer by the name of Curtis Yarvin, analyze some historical document and call for the return of feudalism (he complains that those documents are not studied by historians, which is true for the simple reason that they are false accounts). The problem with the return to feudalism — even if you were to believe the false accounts of how life was good then (it by no means was) — is that the power structure back then was at least held in check by technology, that is, lack thereof. With the invention of mass media and fast transportation, power can be more concentrated than ever before, which is why the greatest invention of Western civilization was the central government, which rose to contain and manage power (of course, this only made conflicts among those governments more violent than ever before, but that fear of annihilation reduced the number of conflicts considerably). BTW, the modern academic definition of politics is, not surprisingly, the management of power in society. Feudalism combined with modern technology has only been tried — to the best of my knowledge — once, in nineteenth century America. The US at the time had a very weak federal government with almost no regulation. The result was a period of extremely fast economic expansion but at great social cost: a large portion of the American population was enslaved in all by name by a very small number of slave-owners-in-all-by-name known as the Robber Barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Stanford, JP Morgan, Frick, et al.). All options were taken from them — they couldn’t migrate (they were sometimes paid in company-issued currency, that was useless anywhere else) and couldn’t organize to concentrate power to improve their lot (in fact, they did organize, but the robber barons had private armies that killed the rabble rousers and intimidated everyone else). The people cried for help, and Theodore Roosevelt rescued them by creating federal regulation.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
Energy is also well defined - for any particular case you'll be able to write down a precise formula defining it. For example, a system of colliding particles has E=sum(p^2/2m) (p is momentum, m is mass). If you want to make a claim that one system has more energy than another, testing that claim will be easy - just apply the formula. If you wanted me to take it seriously, you should have applied the power formula to figure out whether influencing college admissions officers > influencing police - all you did was scoff. I assert that your use of the word "power" is pointless. It transmits no information about the world, much like how you use privilege. Why do you insist on engaging in long discussions advocating the use of words that mean merely "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes"?
- rmxt 12y ago
  Information can most certainly be conveyed outside the use of precise formulas, lest you think that entire fields of human endeavor are bunk (merely "long discussions"): art; music; aspects of philosophy, anthropology and sociology; etc. Nonetheless, I would posit that a number of quantifiable metrics contribute to pron's definition of power (the ability to bend others to your will), such as net worth, yearly earnings, spending patterns, education levels, employment statistics, and social network models, especially when these are considered over time. These "long discussions" that you show disdain for are attempting to introduce a semantic base on which "well defined" terms can be further developed and evaluated in light of new social experiences (e.g., the latest claims of * -ism in SV). pron has set out an extended metaphor, say, which is akin to describing how one would perform an oil drop experiment. That is the opposite of "resistance". Your assertion that "power" and "privilege" are semantically empty is completely without grounding. Just because the metaphoric equivalent of "applying the power formula" has been left as an exercise to the reader, does not mean that the terms of the equation are void of meaning.
- pron 12y ago
  Power is also well defined (I have provided a definition which is not "any probabilistic cause of social outcomes") and in cases like this -- easy to measure. You may assert the last forty years of research are pointless. That it's definition applies in many cases (though not all -- an earthquake leveling a city isn't directly related to power) does not make it any less useful (just like energy is always involved in any interaction of particles). If you apply the definition, you will see that influencing college admissions officers << influencing police in this case. The fact that intractable interactions lend themselves less easily to formulations (let alone closed expressions) does not take away their reality or invalidate the model. Much of the work in applied mathematics (non-linear equations) is qualitative, as well. I think it is you who are resisting to admit that the past decades of research have taught us a lot about how society works.