Social Systems, Evolution, Change, and the Status Quo

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Okay.
Rather than reading up on Unwin, I now actually read the article you provided.
Uhm.
Karl Popper isn't actually one of the postmodern whatevers this guy is accusing of bringing down our society, so he should accept that data consistent with a theory is wirth nothing. I provided a rival theory about material circumstances in an earlier post.
As long as neither is falsified, they stand along side each other, being equally untrue.
That, of course, goes for Unwin's thesis as well. All his book is is a collection of consustent data - provided it actually is correct.

But the guy who wrote the article is spouting some ill-infirmed stuff about postmodern philosophy and transgender issues along side his theories about how female sexual self-determination is bringing down society.
Goddammit, the postmodern philosophers aren't irrational at all. Why do these guys never actually read anything the postmodern guys have written?

The same goes for transgender issues: it turns out the language we use in daily life is very much just a practical tool, and it's not particularly difficult to see how and where the gaps between practical use und representation of reality are. Learn a foreign language, that will help to understand that words are names for concepts that have contingent and fuzzy borders.

The guy writes about god-given rules of behaviour being practical etc.
Well, they tend to be neither god-given, nor absolute. Those rules are contingent on the societies they involved in. They may easily loose their practical value when societies change their structure, and then must be renegotiated. Yeah, it might take a while for a good modus operandi to evolve after we shocked our society with hormonal contraception. God didn't write anything about those, did he?

Finally, the author complains about a loss of large families, leading to a loss of individual identities. Women choosing not to have large families, that is.
Well, if he got what he wanted, we'd all be talking about Malthusian principles now.
Turns out, making things function as technology and knowledge progress is not as easy as keeping the dark ages going.

Woah.. we are spinning out of control here.

Well, back to our previous convo, it's a post-housewifery phenomenon, so I would guess it only really takes off when enough of the (upper-?) middle order families have the ability to get someone or something to do those tasks instead of the wife. Before vacuum cleaners and washing machines etc the turning point would be the ability of the family to purchase a slave or hire a domestic servant. Perhaps the reason women's lib has come so far this time is that household labour-saving gadgets are so much more affordable than slaves.



I don't think these things are entirely independent of one another. Why do we participate in the economy beyond mere survival except to impress women?



Hmm. I can't actually see a second question in there. But this sexual hierarchy stuff doesn't hold much appeal to me as a causal factor. I reject the notion that it's passed on in the genes in any meaningful sense. While genes can provide situational advantages or disadvantages, the alpha/xyz stuff is better thought of as psychological patterns of behaviour that men of all kinds can take on or be primed into in a given environment or local group. It's much more important locally rather than society-wide.

This made me grin. "Everyone will be a frat-boy working in finance. Only immigrants will do the actual work and become doctors or other such high-effort jobs, while the domestic elite will be all busy trying to screw over as many people as necessary to get ahead." Again surprising how many parallels you can draw with the latter days of dead historical empires. Whether sociosexual hierarchies are the key to the question of why human civilisation always declines... again I don't know... maybe?

The monkey study is interesting, I'd be interested in what happened to that monkey hippy society 2-3 generations down the line.

@ your next post, I don't really care to defend the author, I haven't read much else that he has written. That link is just a decent summary of Unwin for the purposes of this thread.

Fair enough -
And: apparently the baboons were still hippies years later, when Sapolsky returned, and they were educating newcomers to the group by ostracizing them for agressive behaviour.
I'll find a link to the story if you want me to, but that's basically it - well, that, and the conclusion that even the most awfully competitive species he worked with could change their ways through culture, and genetics or 'nature' wasn't the only determining factor.
So, yeah, probably "alpha"-ness isn't genetic, however I'm guessing a society in which alpha-ness is the determining factor for procreation, the social factors would point in the same direction.

Oh, and, as to why I partake in economic activity beyond survival: first, only my immediate survival is guaranteed, long term is uncertain. Part of that is because I choose a rather risky career in the creative industries.
However, not a particularly cool one. But I just like to do it. I'm usually happy when I'm doing my work, and when I'm not happy with it, I get it over with and look for something I enjoy doing, even if the money is less.
I'm more dopamine driven than status-driven, I guess

I saw this yesterday, didn't have time to comment, and it looks like the current is already moving pretty fast. For that I probably won't try too hard to jump into dialog but a few overall thoughts maybe:

- Truly complex systems are made of constant feedback loops and it's that constant iteration that adjusts the system toward certain kinds of equilibrium. It seems like the best you can do with the sweep of a pen is find some way to remove an unhelpful blockage. Stopping an undesirable loop that's built into the system is far harder and needs far more careful navigation to sort of redirect force that's accumulated for such a long time.

- In a way there are some grim realities that we're stuck with, like the idea of evolution needing losers as much as winners pretty much assuring the suffering of life implemented on a bell curve and quite often the hollowness and blunting of the victors (perhaps to denote that they only win for a generation or two before becoming an entitled mess).

- Really our most important mobilizations, if we're to care at all about them, would have to be toward existential threats such as destruction of climate.

- Sadly, for the point two clicks above, destruction of each other is required by evolution even if we do greatly decrease capitalism's binding with evolution. The unfortunate side effect - we'll be stuck with that destruction needing to move into a different domain and the only places I can think about it going are sports, shows of physical strength, and if it went toward capacities for violence we'd need to punish unofficial displays such as bullying, banditry, etc. in the extreme to fence that in from unraveling society (and maybe the prison sentence disparity between men and women in sentencing lengths and occurrences would need to go far higher - it's there to begin with apparently because violence is part of the social sorting mechanism for men and yet it's a fire that destroys civilization fast if unmitigated). On that note though we might be able to get rid of things like racism, sexism, etc. but something like ablism - past the minimum of being able to eat and navigate the world - is likely a permanent feature by design.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/bra ... nald-trump

Yup, pretty much.
I wasn't aware of the term alpha male in a human context until I came across a video by a leftie youtuber ridiculing a another youtuber's video on how to become one.
That guy was using a lot of Jungian archetype nonsense to explain why one needs to be an alpha male to gey laid, erm, I mean, unite with a female.
It was basically the same kind of misogynistic rhetoric that the author of that article on Unwin's theory uses.

Interesting article.

<tangential mode activated>

In regards to:


There is an additional element which has been omitted.
The reality that "confidence" can and does "grease" the functioning ability of the mind/brain.



N.B.
This post is not a counter argument against what has been said.
It is an addendum.

Pepe,

You missed this part of the article:

I haven't posted everything from that section, so there is more to read if you will open the article back up.

Why is this on this thread? At best it is tangentially related to a tangent.

Puts most of those on the spectrum at a bit of a disadvantage, wouldn't you say?

BTW,
Keep in mind the inherent divide between what is researched/written with neurotypicals in mind and the relevance to those who are autistic.

For example,
Nietzsche's musings could easily be applied to a neurotypical individual/society but probably misses the mark when it is applied to those on the spectrum,
Which is understandable.
Back then, they hadn't even formulated the concept of Autism, I believe.

In addition, there is even the consideration that those on the spectrum tend to avoid "alpha-male-dom", though there are exceptions to the rule, of course.

Like I said,
Interesting article.
Much food for thought.