[extropy-chat] Politics: worthwhile commentary

[Jeff Medina]

On 12/28/05, Joseph Bloch <transhumanist at goldenfuture.net> wrote:
> I find any argument that begins by saying, in effect, "unless you are
> referencing my favorite thinker, your argument is not worth considering"
> to be somewhat less than consideration in and of itself.

With the relatively important qualifier that areas with even moderate
sophistication have foundational ideas one really does need to read up
on before one's own ideas are worthy of the consideration of people
who actually have studied up in that area.

There are some exceptions to this, as with almost every rule, but the
ratio of brilliant to crazy-or-stupid-or-ignorant is so low that one
is almost assured to be wasting one's time listening to the thoughts
of the uninformed (say, not even at the level of someone who majored
in that field as an undergraduate).

> This seems like
> an attempt to require that every political argument be framed in a
> Friedmanian framework, and smacks me as being as hubristic as those who
> say that insist all problems must be examined from the standpoint of
> Bayesian analysis.

It isn't hubris for an evolutionary biologist to demand familiarity
with Mayr, Gould, Maynard Smith, etc., before listening to what you
have to say about evolution. Nor for a mathematician Kleene, Cauchy,
Bernoulli, and so on.

Similarly, there are areas in which certain mathematical results are
heavily relevant to an area, such as decision theory (something of a
meta-area, applicable to reasoning in general, and hence to thinkers
in all other fields), and here we might invoke Bayes, Schlaifer, de
Finetti, and so forth. And again it would not be hubristic.

To me, there is a distinction between demanding one read Thomas
Friedman and these other (above) demands. Though I'm rather less
familiar with political theory than other areas, it appears he, unlike
the figureheads mentioned above for other fields, is not anywhere near
as widely respected by practicing political theorists. This makes the
demand closer to Joe's "hubris" assertion, though I think unjustified
is the more appropriate term. Maybe Robert Bradbury is well-read
enough in politics to feel confident (and be right, *not* hubristic,
to do so) in his assessment. I don't know his background, aside from
the science  & business related blurbs on the web, so I couldn't say.
I'll just say that it seems a strange choice, given the apparently
large proportion of politics & int'l relations professors who aren't
singing Friedman's praises, to put it lightly.

--
Jeff Medina
http://www.painfullyclear.com/

Community Director
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/

Relationships & Community Fellow
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
http://www.ieet.org/

School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/