Construal-level theory (near-far) is one of the most important recent developments in social psychology for political theory and even philosophy, but ego-depletion theory is more important.
For one thing, it solves the whole philosophical problem of akrasia, as I explain in "Explaining Akrasia" Part 1 of Philosophical and Political Implications of ego-depletion theory -- http://tinyurl.com/au9cgp7
I know what the worst plausible language may look like, though. The one where the speakers think the words carve reality at joints, but the words still don't because you won't know any better where the joints are just because you changed language. If language can influence thinking at all, the rationality language has the potential of being the worst.
What would the ideal language of rationality look like?
Isn't this more or less the same question as what would an AI look like? Perhaps another angle on that question, but it's safe to say nobody today knows.
Natural language doesn't carve reality at its joints for some good reasons in that communicative and cognitive precision compete with efficiency. I would presume that natural languages via natural selection have made these difficult tradeoffs, although intellectual progress probably portends that some day we'll discovery how to do better than nature.
It's a weird hypothesis. There is probably a better one from a change in expectations of social justice.
To signal honorability and avoid taking credit for what's not mine, it's not my hypothesis--since Guest was replying to me.
I don't think I've considered the question before. But it's one of those things one has tacitly assumed and upon being presented with the problem, has a thoroughly obvious solution.
But surely someone has systematically defended this theory of democracy. Anyone know?
I agree with Dave's response to your objection as well. I'd add one proviso--that there's an intrinsic drive to one vote one "adult citizen" standard because it represents the brightest possible line.
What those of us who permit ourselves to speak of social justice really must mean is measured in terms of approach to the bright line. Since, like Dave said and Cicero before "endless money forms the sinews of war," those thoroughly committed to this bright line (the far left) are also committed to an economic system that truly rather than only formally realizes equality of power: equality of economic resources.
Democracy is a rough-and-ready solution to the problem of violent revolution. It doesn't pay to to have a fitness test for every potential voter to see how effective they'd be as a revolutionary.
Obviously some individuals are going to be more effective 'soldiers' than others, but the law of large numbers holds and these things average out - there is nothing to be gained in terms of violence reduction by allocating votes to individuals based on their physical fitness.
Broad classes of people, on the other hand, do have differing abilities to revolt violently.
That's why children can't vote. (Recall the Children's Crusade...)
Women got the vote soon after the industrial revolution dramatically reduced the influence of physical strength on violence. (The Colt revolver was called "the equalizer" because it enabled the physically weak to be nearly as dangerous as the strong.)
Going back further, only landowners had the vote. Because "norvos belli, pecuniam" (endless money forms the sinews of war --Cicero). When a middle class arose without hand-to-mouth dependency on landowners, they got the vote. Not before.
The idea that democracy has anything to do with justice ('social' or otherwise) is an after-the-fact rationalization. In a pure democracy (which, happily, doesn't exist) 51% of the electorate would be free to torture, enslave, and kill the other 49%. What connection would THAT have with justice?
srdiamond, it can't be that bright of a Schelling point - teenagers are already barred from voting merely because of their age. Until recently, women couldn't vote either. Now they can - because we discovered they have guns, too?
It's a weird hypothesis. There is probably a better one from a change in expectations of social justice.
Language for what purpose? Different languages would be optimized for different purposes.
For rationality, I'd say *ontology* is the natural 'language of logic'. Ontology 'carves reality at the joints' , pinpointing various categories and the relations between them in a given domain. In fact, I'd say that ontology is 'mathematics made concrete'. Ontology is mathematics translated into conscious awareness.
A conscious post-human capable of full reflection would have immediate intuitive access to the 'ontology-scope', a new form of awareness that would appear just as real as color or sound seems to us; this type of conscious awareness of the 'ontology-scape' would in effect, consitute a sort of 'theory of everything'.
What makes you think a rationally designed language would make "clear communication naturally easier and more efficient?" It could have the opposite effect.
If rationality just means "that which improves things", it is just a synonym for advance or progress. The argument here wants to retain the technical meaning of 'rationality', while implicitly supposing that rationality is so closely related to the concept of improvement that to suggest that whenever the concept of rationality is used, the speaker can be regarded as arguing for improvement. Should we improve x? Yeah, why not. Therefore we should redesign x using reason. People who apply reason to social problems and technology are therefore improvers. To oppose these people's plans is to oppose improvement.
Questions along the lines of "should we regulate x?" are similar. The question is almost always loaded. It does not mean "would attempting to regulate x help?" It means "regulation is that which fixes the problem, so why aren't we regulating x?". The success of the regulation is assumed.
"Now that we, as a species, have a much clearer picture of the machinery of human thought and brain-functioning"
The rise of neuroscience and computer science has also provided plenty of opportunity for people to impose their own favorite metaphors and dogmas on their own subjectivity. So far the Mind Age isn't producing enlightenment, it's producing scattered cognitive cults.
Redesign the institution of language to make it "more rational" if you like, but the result is not going to be a genuine rational application of new knowledge to a new domain; it will be just another techology-era cultural mutation, in which new "scientific" beliefs collide with something pre-scientific to produce an experimental hybrid with unknown consequences.
Now that we, as a species, have a much clearer picture of the machinery of human thought and brain-functioning, why is it that we persist in communicating through clumsy languages shaped by the blind forces of natural selection? What would a rationally-designed language look like?
Would it be possible to construct a language optimized for communication?Would it be possible to construct a language optimized to minimize the possibility of miscommunication?Would it be possible/useful to construct a language with a syntax that looked more like a web-diagram than a straight line? There's no reason for a modern language to be framed by the scarcity of real-estate on a slab of stone.
Why not try a language with different grammars for map-territory and map-map discussion?
We've been able to learn what we've learned this far because of the modularity of language, which provides the framework for a certain kind of shared analytical thinking. Much about the world and ourselves would have been impossible to learn without access to language. Language is like... The roots of the collective human skill tree, isn't it worth it to try to craft a new one now based on the true knowledge that we've unlocked thus far about the structure of reality and mind?
Would not this new language "grant bonuses all the way up the skill tree", for lack of a better way to put it? Couldn't we become better at practically everything if we made clear communication naturally easier and more efficient?
What would the ideal language of rationality look like?
never mind...
How to make your last-minute decision on how to vote--according to near-far theory. - http://tinyurl.com/9exlxlk
Construal-level theory (near-far) is one of the most important recent developments in social psychology for political theory and even philosophy, but ego-depletion theory is more important.
For one thing, it solves the whole philosophical problem of akrasia, as I explain in "Explaining Akrasia" Part 1 of Philosophical and Political Implications of ego-depletion theory -- http://tinyurl.com/au9cgp7
I know what the worst plausible language may look like, though. The one where the speakers think the words carve reality at joints, but the words still don't because you won't know any better where the joints are just because you changed language. If language can influence thinking at all, the rationality language has the potential of being the worst.
What would the ideal language of rationality look like?
Isn't this more or less the same question as what would an AI look like? Perhaps another angle on that question, but it's safe to say nobody today knows.
Natural language doesn't carve reality at its joints for some good reasons in that communicative and cognitive precision compete with efficiency. I would presume that natural languages via natural selection have made these difficult tradeoffs, although intellectual progress probably portends that some day we'll discovery how to do better than nature.
It's a weird hypothesis. There is probably a better one from a change in expectations of social justice.
To signal honorability and avoid taking credit for what's not mine, it's not my hypothesis--since Guest was replying to me.
I don't think I've considered the question before. But it's one of those things one has tacitly assumed and upon being presented with the problem, has a thoroughly obvious solution.
But surely someone has systematically defended this theory of democracy. Anyone know?
I agree with Dave's response to your objection as well. I'd add one proviso--that there's an intrinsic drive to one vote one "adult citizen" standard because it represents the brightest possible line.
What those of us who permit ourselves to speak of social justice really must mean is measured in terms of approach to the bright line. Since, like Dave said and Cicero before "endless money forms the sinews of war," those thoroughly committed to this bright line (the far left) are also committed to an economic system that truly rather than only formally realizes equality of power: equality of economic resources.
As srdiamond said, you need a bright line.
Democracy is a rough-and-ready solution to the problem of violent revolution. It doesn't pay to to have a fitness test for every potential voter to see how effective they'd be as a revolutionary.
Obviously some individuals are going to be more effective 'soldiers' than others, but the law of large numbers holds and these things average out - there is nothing to be gained in terms of violence reduction by allocating votes to individuals based on their physical fitness.
Broad classes of people, on the other hand, do have differing abilities to revolt violently.
That's why children can't vote. (Recall the Children's Crusade...)
Women got the vote soon after the industrial revolution dramatically reduced the influence of physical strength on violence. (The Colt revolver was called "the equalizer" because it enabled the physically weak to be nearly as dangerous as the strong.)
Going back further, only landowners had the vote. Because "norvos belli, pecuniam" (endless money forms the sinews of war --Cicero). When a middle class arose without hand-to-mouth dependency on landowners, they got the vote. Not before.
The idea that democracy has anything to do with justice ('social' or otherwise) is an after-the-fact rationalization. In a pure democracy (which, happily, doesn't exist) 51% of the electorate would be free to torture, enslave, and kill the other 49%. What connection would THAT have with justice?
srdiamond, it can't be that bright of a Schelling point - teenagers are already barred from voting merely because of their age. Until recently, women couldn't vote either. Now they can - because we discovered they have guns, too?
It's a weird hypothesis. There is probably a better one from a change in expectations of social justice.
Language for what purpose? Different languages would be optimized for different purposes.
For rationality, I'd say *ontology* is the natural 'language of logic'. Ontology 'carves reality at the joints' , pinpointing various categories and the relations between them in a given domain. In fact, I'd say that ontology is 'mathematics made concrete'. Ontology is mathematics translated into conscious awareness.
A conscious post-human capable of full reflection would have immediate intuitive access to the 'ontology-scope', a new form of awareness that would appear just as real as color or sound seems to us; this type of conscious awareness of the 'ontology-scape' would in effect, consitute a sort of 'theory of everything'.
What makes you think a rationally designed language would make "clear communication naturally easier and more efficient?" It could have the opposite effect.
If rationality just means "that which improves things", it is just a synonym for advance or progress. The argument here wants to retain the technical meaning of 'rationality', while implicitly supposing that rationality is so closely related to the concept of improvement that to suggest that whenever the concept of rationality is used, the speaker can be regarded as arguing for improvement. Should we improve x? Yeah, why not. Therefore we should redesign x using reason. People who apply reason to social problems and technology are therefore improvers. To oppose these people's plans is to oppose improvement.
Questions along the lines of "should we regulate x?" are similar. The question is almost always loaded. It does not mean "would attempting to regulate x help?" It means "regulation is that which fixes the problem, so why aren't we regulating x?". The success of the regulation is assumed.
Big traders would have a hard time getting sizable bets matched on Intrade
Add the observation that "big trader" tends to correspond to "sophisticated trader," and we probably have the answer to the original question.
"Now that we, as a species, have a much clearer picture of the machinery of human thought and brain-functioning"
The rise of neuroscience and computer science has also provided plenty of opportunity for people to impose their own favorite metaphors and dogmas on their own subjectivity. So far the Mind Age isn't producing enlightenment, it's producing scattered cognitive cults.
Redesign the institution of language to make it "more rational" if you like, but the result is not going to be a genuine rational application of new knowledge to a new domain; it will be just another techology-era cultural mutation, in which new "scientific" beliefs collide with something pre-scientific to produce an experimental hybrid with unknown consequences.
Now that we, as a species, have a much clearer picture of the machinery of human thought and brain-functioning, why is it that we persist in communicating through clumsy languages shaped by the blind forces of natural selection? What would a rationally-designed language look like?
Would it be possible to construct a language optimized for communication?Would it be possible to construct a language optimized to minimize the possibility of miscommunication?Would it be possible/useful to construct a language with a syntax that looked more like a web-diagram than a straight line? There's no reason for a modern language to be framed by the scarcity of real-estate on a slab of stone.
Why not try a language with different grammars for map-territory and map-map discussion?
We've been able to learn what we've learned this far because of the modularity of language, which provides the framework for a certain kind of shared analytical thinking. Much about the world and ourselves would have been impossible to learn without access to language. Language is like... The roots of the collective human skill tree, isn't it worth it to try to craft a new one now based on the true knowledge that we've unlocked thus far about the structure of reality and mind?
Would not this new language "grant bonuses all the way up the skill tree", for lack of a better way to put it? Couldn't we become better at practically everything if we made clear communication naturally easier and more efficient?
What would the ideal language of rationality look like?
New York, by far the largest, densest city in the Western world
Isn't that Mexico City?
You need a bright line--Schelling point sort of thing.
Well, if majority wants to still be able to vote when they're old...