no love for it from me either, i’m sorry to say. the “society only exists when we overcome our base sexual desires” meme is tired. my university days were simultaneously my most promiscuous and my most productive (subjectively, measured by my extra-curricular contributions to technology). that’s a sample size of 1 (or dozens? depends how you measure it), but Huxley doesn’t even claim a single sample for the opposing view — much less an experiment, despite claiming this foundational assumption as “scientific”.
are complex systems like societies path-dependent? absolutely. the example of decentralized Swedish production arising after centralized English production is intriguing, in that this diversity appears to be predicated on the two societies having been only loosely connected prior to this — suggesting that this sort of divergence become more difficult as societies become more globalized (the opposing point of view being that globalization means those people with similar, but niche, divergent interests can more easily locate and collaborate with eachother). but that’s sort of the only interesting thing i could scrape from that intro, and it’s 80% my own extrapolation.
no love for it from me either, i’m sorry to say. the “society only exists when we overcome our base sexual desires” meme is tired. my university days were simultaneously my most promiscuous and my most productive (subjectively, measured by my extra-curricular contributions to technology). that’s a sample size of 1 (or dozens? depends how you measure it), but Huxley doesn’t even claim a single sample for the opposing view — much less an experiment, despite claiming this foundational assumption as “scientific”.
are complex systems like societies path-dependent? absolutely. the example of decentralized Swedish production arising after centralized English production is intriguing, in that this diversity appears to be predicated on the two societies having been only loosely connected prior to this — suggesting that this sort of divergence become more difficult as societies become more globalized (the opposing point of view being that globalization means those people with similar, but niche, divergent interests can more easily locate and collaborate with eachother). but that’s sort of the only interesting thing i could scrape from that intro, and it’s 80% my own extrapolation.