Young Master Smeet
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As I've also indicated, democracy is more than voting. It is an ongoping debate regarding self organisation, nose counting is just one means to that end. So here I'm actually arguing against you, in favour of democracy.
I've already stated my probhlem with voting: it's pointless. The winners will win, the losers won't change their mind. We can't "forbid" research into the losing proposition, because majorities have the right to try and become majorities, that includes collecting sufficient evidence. What I prefer is the democratic method of everyone making up their own mind. People can choose to rely on the rational authority of experts, or they can challenge it as thy please/ What is important is that information and education are widely available, and there are multiple fora for debate and discussion.Democratically we can set research priorities, allocate resources to research and support the administration of research. We can set up expectations of the democratic organisation of learned societies. As I've already set out. I just don't need to see why we need to vote on the results.
OK, so lets reformulate:Socialism is a system of society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.Is that better?Anyway, to selection. We inhabit a roughly similar planet to each other. Our brains are constructed in roughly the same way, and our sense organs operate in roughly the same fashion (there are degrees of variation but I think we can average them away). We inhabit a similar culture. So, it's far to say that our selections will be roughly similar, and we can average them away. Selections and biases can be accounted for (and minimised).So, if "The Truth" is unobtainable, then it doesn't matter. What mattersw is that we mutually inhabit a world where according to our best ability to sense and to reason we can say that certain claims about the world can be true to our observations.Members of our community, who are similar to us, can go forth and collect knowledge, that we will believe because we have confdence in their method. Personally, I have no experience or proof that India exists, but I have no good reason to doubt the evidence therefore presented to me by otehr people. That's what it means to be a social being.
Lbird,democracy isn't nose counting, it is an ongoing debate without force whereby the minority have the right and opportunity to try and become the majority. Are you really going to use force to make scientists abide by the vote? What will that entail? A public statment? Making them work on projects they think of as seriously floored: bread without flour or water? Willt he minority be able to go on with their research to try and become a majority? If so, again, what is the point of the vote. It won't change anyone's minds, and it can't direct our research efforts.Socialism means the free association of producers, that's its first premise.
LBird wrote:So, if the baker insists that "it's tasty bread, and good for you", that's it, is it?The eaters of the bread are not allowed a collective opinion about the baker's recommendations?It doesn't sound very democratic to me, YMS!Just time for a quick one. We're allowed an opinion, but since the labour of the baker is free, we can't force them to do any specific baking, nor can we vote for a recipe that simply won't work. "We demand bread without flour, yeast or water" (There you go, have some nice lard). I can discuss with the baker, or take up baking myself, but for the most part, I'm free to leave it to the baker. It's not rocket science.
Oh, and a quick Charlie quote. AFK rest of today, so enjoy:
Charley wrote:On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers – human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinate nature of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear. The specific character of each essential power is precisely its specific essence, and therefore also the specific mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual, living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, ||VIII| but with all his senses.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
Here's what I don't get. How is science being done by scientists different from baking being done by bakers? Sure, we'll have democratic control over the whole system, but bakers will be free to bake as they see fit, in democratic workplaces. No one will worry about a secret cabal of bakers (though they will have to be transparent about their methods, for our safety). Collective action doesn't mean everyone doing everything together, in fact, it's quite the opposite, it's people acting separately to achieve results for the community. If I have to do all my own baking, and all my own science, that is the acme of indvidiualism. I've outlined before how collectively members of the community ciould carry out science within a democratic framework. I simply can't see any point in voting on their results.
SPINTCOM > Files > Standing Orders Committee and look for the file called "Inaugural Meeting" (members only).
An example of the ideology of truth: it is entirely true that some people fiddle the welfare. This is incontrovertible. If this becomes the significant fact that is dwelt upon, that is an action of ideology. It doesn't change the truth (in fact, no factual disputation will avail, dole is for scroungers becomes the whole of thought).I would thus argue that ideology is distinct from error, misaprehension and social deixis.
Also, I'll pray in aid:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problemFermi estimation: sometims a rule of thumb is good science. Assumingfootballers are simply two metre high cones produces roughly useful figures for modelling rugby tackles, for instance. Truth just has to coincide with the world enough.
And the process of science is around minimising the potential for bias. You or could have an interesting argument down the pub arguing whether or not a wall was yellow. We couldn't dispute, after measured, whether it was reflecting light with a wavelength between 570 and 590 nanometers. Per Azimov's essay, we could refine that reading down with sucessively more powerful instruments, and get to ever smaller decimal places in our findings. That would be a fact which exists for me because it exists for another. Whether I choose to accept that fact will play with my biases. What I do with that fact will depend on my biass (yes, the truth is ideological too).
LBird wrote:YMS wrote:… ideology is by almost its definition unconscious …Who's 'definition'?
Well, Marx' (according to Zizek:http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/cynicism-as-a-form-of-ideology/
Charlie(ish) wrote:The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" ("they do not know it, but they are doing it"). The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.Arguably, the dismal conservative view of humans as fallen is more suited to the notion that we will always be biased (per my mention of Tebbit before).(Article linked to for the phrase from Marx, though it is indicative of the sorts of debates that go on around this topic).
But, Shirley, ideology is by almost its definition unconscious (or non-conscious)? After all, that's why Althusser maintained that we could see ideology in literature, because it was exteriorised and, in a way, more alienated. At least, ion most of the models (I would exclude Chomskyian versions, because of the implicit intentionalism he ascribes to ideological actors, although, again, for the objects of propaganda, knowing ideology as ideology destroys its status as ideology).
I tend to post links on the basis that they are interesting, and perheps worthy fo further discussion, always with the proviso that I believe all Yorkshiremen are liars and everything that follows from that statement.
Indeed, in its own terms, fascism is not only right, but it's actions are tragically necessary to save the world from Bolshevism and the Jewish conspiracy. That all ideologies are equally valid is the outcome of your position, not mine. After all, is the abolition of the nation, of property and family a monstrous outcome of filthy socialist ideology?It is perfectly possible to do abhorent things scientifically: a science of torture is abomnible but does exist. The science of the atomic bomb and autonomous killer robots exists. Knowing how is different, though, from doing.
