Young Master Smeet
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But then if everything is ideology, then it becomes a banal observation, and it becomes the eternal truth. Why should one ideology matetr any more than any other? It simply becomes the sort of thing accepted by Norman Tebbit (I recall seeing in an OU programme about ideology) blithely saying "Well, yes, everyone is biased, that's natural and indeed good, in some ways" never mind, lets get on. It's also the bedrock of empiricists what I have met.Now, there is an extent to which Goedel's theorem does demand ideology, or at least, unsupportable presuppositions, to use Austin's term. But that is arguable, and they can be laid bare. And it also has bnothing to say about class power.I'd suggest, in socialism, we wouldn't call these things ideology, just points of view.
On the founding conference name debate:
Quote:Anderson and Lehane moved:"That the name of the Party Shall be 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain."'Neumann and Blaustein moved an amendment:"That the name of the Party Shall be 'The Social-Democratic Party'".A good discussion followed, Hawkins, Jackson, E. Allen, Turner and Kent speaking in favour of the motion, and Martin, Mrs. Salaman, Killick and Albery for the amendment. On a show of hands, there voted for the amendment 27 against 76. The amendment was therefore deemed lost.Martin and Neumann moved a further amendment:-"That the name of the Party should be 'The Social-Democratic Party of Great Britain'."After some discussion a vote was taken, and there were 31 in favour and 73 against. The amendment was declared lost.Another amendment was moved by McEntee and Hutchens:"That the name of the Party shall be 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain and Ireland'." This amendment was also lost, only 6 voting in favour.There being no further amendments, the motion: "That the name of the Party shall be 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain' was put to the meeting and carried by 91 votes to 3. The announcement of the result was greeted with loud applause.Via SPINTCOM files
Do hunter gatherers have ideology? Certainly, they have a world view (although the extent to which that 'blinkers' them may well be an interpollation of anthropologists imposing a protstant schema onto the purported and reported susperstition of the 'primitives' is debatable).Anyway, some recent reading. noticeably in Botrh Pannekoek's HIstory of Astronomy, and Isaac Azimov's popular science behemoth New Guide to Science they both observe a significant shift, from about the birth of the Royal Society[*] from individual's working in attics to collective science as expressed in correspondence and societies. Now, this must be a part of the standard history of science to have been mentioned by both writers so.Now, I've also been reading a book on the application of statistics to football (I pass ont heir prediction that there will be around 1,000 goals in the premier league this year, at an average of 2.6 per match). Now, such statistics are being driven by the technology that suddenly makes measuring a complex phenomena like soccer possible, before we simply could not. It has been tried, they quote Charles Reep, a pioneer of soccer stats:"Provide a counter to reliance on memory, tradition and impressions that lead to soccer ideologies" Here The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football is Wrong / By Chris Anderson, David Sally.Interestingly, a quick google search for Reep & Ideology threw up this tidbit:"But the essential problem with Reep, as Barney Ronay masterfully detailed in a 2003 When Saturday Comes column, was that despite his experience as an accountant, his approach to understanding football was marked more by ideology than science." HereIn common parlance, ideology is one of those irregular verbs: I am scientific, you are mistaken, he/she/it is an ideologue. of course, ideology 101 tells us that precisely is ideology in action. Interestingly, though, the accusation levelled by Anderson and Sally is that Reep, who was a mid twentieth century technocrat, precisely let his assumptions get in the way of the data. So Anderson and Sally tell us that a manager can account for as much as 15% of a teams success, then that is what the data tells us.Anyway, two last tidbits. Firstly, remember you can get most books for free (or a very small charge from your public library) and Worldcat can help you find out if a library near you actually has a book in stock (Universities may let you pay for a reference ticket).Finally, I leave you with Asimov on the wrongness of wrong, which is quite relevent, IMNSHO, to discussions here.http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
OK, poll ended:http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_498584c6116bc7ebSome points. I could have chosen cartoon characters, favourite deserts, or anything, but I wanted somethign people on the board could feel connected to. I was only after non-random preference orderings, so I was a touch narked when a few people took the poll seriously enough to just enter spoilt or effectively blank ballots — though I suppose it is illustrative of what would happen in practice.Yes, there were some errors in set up that could have been overcome with more preparation. Is houldn't have allowed voting while write in votes were in operation (that meant that early votes cast effectively didn't count against about half the options); I think I shouldn't have allowed "No opinion" options, again, because that meant a straight abstention, it would have been better to have forced a low ranking; none of the above should have been called re-open nominations. And "Breat Britain".Aside from that the results have been moderately instructive.So, if we had only had a first past the post race, the results would have been:World Socialist Movement (Britain) 4World Socialist Party UK3None of the above2World Socialist Party of Breat Britain2World Socialist Movement UK1World Socialist Party (Britain)1World Socialist Party (GB)1World Socialist Party (UK)1Clearly, opinion would be split, and the result would be unsatisfactory to many (and lack a mjaority legitimacy). So, by some procedure, to make a decision, we'd have to winnow down the choices. Yes, we could have gone to a committee, but the result would have been the same, a choice of a less preferred option for some of the electorate, at least the below actually reflects the degree to which people support alternatives. 123456789101112131. B : World Socialist Party UK -978897108898102. A: World Socialist Party of Breat Britain 3-7867968877103. World Socialist Movement UK (write-in) 76-9891071298784. World Socialist Movement (Britain) (write-in) 765-8867968855.
World Socialist Movement in Great Britain 5667-7768788106. World Socialist Party (Britain) (write-in) 56567-97996767. World Socialist Party (UK) (write-in) 644774-7987758. C: World Socialist Party of England and Scotland 1556545-6676109. World Socialist Party (GB) (write-in) 76367557-887610. World Socialist Movement (GB) (write-in) 765775577-88511. F: Common Ownership League 3545476565-7912. E: The Wage Labour Abolition Society 45454665755-1013. None of the above (write-in) 233625626632-World Socialist Party UK is the undisputed winner, ranked above evry other choice by more voters.What I'd suggest is that we could use such polls, not to make final decisions, but in place of the committee (or by a wider committee), after which we could have a fuller vote on either confirming the result, or between the top two choices. The rich information given by the rankings helps us understand trends in thought.You should be able to vote once a day. Did you put a different name? I note that the vote count has gone uop by two since I posted today, so maybe your vote has gone through? One of the votes today just ranked everything 13, so maybe that was you?
OK, last call for voters (and it is possible/permissible for previous voters to vote again if they want, but I'd ask them to change their votes, please: I'm only after non-random test data).
SP,If you could go to:http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/vote.pl?id=E_498584c6116bc7eb&akey=4bf14a524205fa18and cast your vote there, that would be helpful…
And, back to China:http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-9d7f-China-Diary-1-2-3#.U_23rdjgdhc
Quote:Restaurants in China are sparking a craze for robot workers. At a noodle restaurant in Xiamen in east China’s Fujian Province, a robot chef repeatedly shaves dough into a boiling wok with efficiency and precision. A human simply wouldn't be able to keep up.The robot shaver, capable of making four bowls of noodles a minute, is also inexpensive. “A human shaver costs me at least 2,000 yuan (about £195) a month but the robot, working 10 hours a day, only costs 3kWh of power,” said Zheng Guozhao, owner of the restaurant.“In a year, the money saved from hiring cooks will be enough to buy two more robots,” he said, which is a telling comment on the labour situation in China, which used to have an abundance of low-paid workers.Just to add, the CIVS engine will allow equal ranking, so you could, theoretically vote:A>B=C=D>E>F however, that effectively means when when B & C are compared, the vote wouldn't count (since neither is ranked above the other), but would mean that B is preferred to F and would count as a vote in that comparison.
If folk could go to the site at the link (two of you have) and express your preferences there, that would help a little. No opinion is a ranking option, as is a write in vote. I've added two of the suggestions so far.The tactic is to rank in order of preference (starting in either direction. If you think about each preference as being a two horse race, so if you were faced with E or B, which would you choose. If you would prefer E to B you would rank it higher. If you don't rank something it's automatically last, so you can plump and just vote for one option (that is risky, however, as it means if that is a losing option you won't sway any of your lesser choices). Also, that provides less information.The poll is below:http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/vote.pl?id=E_498584c6116bc7eb&akey=4bf14a524205fa18
The condorcet Jury Theorem is slightly different from condorcet voting, that is simply listing preferrences in order, and seeing which one wins in a pairwise comparison. So, in your above, C is compared with A, C with B and A with B, as if it were a series of two horse races. The voting paradox could apply, and there are a number of techniques for tie breaks in the usually unlikely event of a tie. Among a hundred people, you'd likely get a result.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_paradoxIn any event, you get rich information of preferences.Counting could be a sod, which is why you really need to use software (which is freely available online).
ALB wrote:I write as someone who thought that the present fascia of HO was ok (after all, it's only seen by passers-by in a street in one London suburb) and who doesn't like the decision finally reached, but I can't see any other way of reaching a decision on a matter like this.Condorcet voting doesn't reach the least objectionable result, it fairly reliably finds a genuine pluarility, and could have been quickly and readily achived by an email vote: we are missing out on a trick by not using such devices. Ranked choice voting will play an important part in socialism.
I supose it's arguable that one can know without ideas: dogs know things, and yet have no ideas: but I think that's arguable, since we're still talking about, essentially, mental states, and the property of being a mental state. Both ideas and knowledge are parts of the mental domain. I can't see "knowledge" being f any other stuff than matter or ideas…
I don't see how C can be different from B, knowledge is ideal, in as much as it belongs to the realm of ideas. And isn't this just a statement of basic monism? Back to Loony's line: 'Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism'. etc.Anyway, some drive-by quotes from Tony Pancake:
Quote:If at times man is referred to as the “lawmaker of nature,” it must be added that nature very often disregards these laws and summons man to make better ones.and
Quote:Through his labor man does not oppose nature as an external or alien world. On the contrary, by the toil of his hands he transforms the external world to such an extent that the original natural substance is no longer discernable, and while this process goes on, man changes, too. Thus, man creates his own world: human society in a nature changed by him. What meaning, then, has the question of whether his thinking leads to truth? The object of his thinking is that which he himself produces by his physical and mental activities and which he controls through his brain. This is not a question of partial truths such as, for instance, those of which Engels wrote in his book on Feuerbach that the artificial production of the natural dye alizarin would prove the validity of the chemical formula employed. This is not, to repeat, a question of partial truths in a specific field of knowledge, where the practical consequence either affirms or refutes them. Rather the point in question here is a philosophical one, namely, whether human thought is capable of encompassing the real, the deepest truth of the world. That the philosopher, in his secluded study, who is concerned exclusively with abstract philosophical concepts, which are derived in turn from abstract scientific concepts also formulated outside of practical life experiences, should have his doubts in the midst of this world of shadows is easily understood. But for human beings who live and act in the real every day world the question has no meaning. The truth of thought, says Marx, is nothing other than power and mastery over the real world.http://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/materialism/index.htm
