Random Thoughts: Conspiracies and Emergence, Politics and Science
Just a few random thoughts that came up while browsing the fringes of the political blogosphere about the US elections and the candidates running for the presidency as pastime this weekend.
Conspiracy and Emergence
There is an enormous amount of the most weird implicit assumptions, suspicions, lines of reasoning available, where any objection/proof of the contrary/reaction is treated as part of an orchestrated cover-up. Makes you wonder why they bother at all if they believe their conspiracy theory to be true themselves.
Conspiracy theorists see orchestrated malicious willful intent everywhere. Haven't they ever heard of emergence and trends? Or how complexity theory tells us the possibility of reconstructing causality afterwards does not mean that that chain of causality could have been planned or predicted? Or that logic dictates you can prove that something happened, but you usually cannot prove something didn't happen? Or about statistics and its correct uses? Don't they know it is the observer that sees the patterns, and that it doesn't mean the pattern actually exists or is observed by others?
Politics and Science
To my European/Dutch eyes the portrayal of Democrats as 'left' is amusing. To me it is all pretty much rightwing conservatism. My political views fall on the right-of-center here in the Netherlands, which puts me a couple of miles left of the US Democrats. Viewpoint and distance determine the amount of detail you see or need to see. (Kind of like how in the TV programme Big Brother very minor events were blown-up to enormous proportions by the participants, because it was the only thing happening) What looks like a huge gap to the candidates in the US elections, often seems as relevant to me as being able to determine a dozen subtly different versions of Marxism, and becoming bitterly divided over it. And on top of that it all seems so antiquated. Left, right, left, right.
What would new political movements look like if they were based on current scientific insights, from cognitive sciences, life and social sciences, complexity theory, system dynamics etc? Instead of insights from the 1700's where all our current political 'flavours' are scientifically rooted? What must have been very exciting then (I really mean exciting. You can feel the author's excitement reading books from that era), translating the latest insights in how society works into a political agenda, has become stale after over two centuries. Especially given what we now, through scienctific method (a gift from that same era!), know about how change works, how innovation works, how our minds work, how we decide things, how individual acts will or will not aggregate to a whole, and how social networks and structures function. Wouldn't it be exciting to go through our own Enlightenment?
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PermalinkTon, the U.S. has been dominated by a two-party system for so long that our experience is very different from most parliamentary democracies. Here the third parties serve two purposes: one, as (political) science experiments, proposing ideas that may eventually be adopted by one of the major parties. Two, as an outlet for voter frustration, as was the case with George Wallace's American Party or the campaigns of John Anderson and Ross Perot.
Also, the majority of people are not early adopters. As the Declaration of Independence said, "All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
People use logic, but they're not that logical -- e.g., saving $5 on a $20 item seems "better" than saving it on a $100 item even though the amount saved is the same. With over 110 million voting, Obama's victory has many parents, some of whom don't stand out much in the crowd.
Posted by: Dave Ferguson at November 5, 2008 1:47 PMHi Dave, thanks for commenting. I hadn't realized the role you point out for third parties as a laboratory. Perhaps those type of discussions are more visible in our own centers of power, with about 2 dozen parties in parliament. Sometimes it seems to me the Democrats and Republicans contain half a dozen or so of groups within themselves, that would be parties in their own right here.
On logic and change, yes, we humans tend to not be that good at it, certainly not as a collective. An evolutionary feature I am sure, not a bug. Being the complex adaptive systems that we are, hopping from one 'stable' point in the plane of probabilities to another as a collective is slow going. That is why the fringes are always so interesting to watch, and see when it gets to the point when the core is ready to move as well.
Posted by: Ton Zijlstra at November 5, 2008 1:59 PM
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