Absolutely, but it’s not necessarily as simple as patternmatching to “claims label” and “is visible and obvious to me personally.” Especially when you’re dealing with stuff like religion, ideology, culture or politics, it can be hard to make any really meaningful statements that generalize usefully.
How does socialism work out in practice? It’s tempting for some folks to point to the USSR, but that’s just because it’s a big obvious thing with the word “Socialism” prominently emblazoned on it. The EU is pretty darn relevant there as well.
When most Westerners think “Islam”, they don’t think “polyandric, matrifocal, highly-educated pluralists comfortable with secularism” either, but the Minangkabau people outnumber al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban combined. Those latter have a lot more to do with the first things that spring to mind when Westerners hear the word “Islam” though.
What I’m saying is, “How does this work out in practice” is terribly vulnerable to the availability bias.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think socialism (State Communism) and socialism (western Europe—I’m not sure what the best name is for democracies with strong safety nets) are the same thing—they have extremely different practices and trajectories. I think this supports your point that you need to actually know something before you try to address the question of how an idea works out in practice.
If it’s any consolation, I don’t just wonder that sort of thing for social justice. I’ve thought how Atlas Shrugged, a novel which is an extended attack on crony capitalism, has led to people who support corporations in general.
Now that I think about it, Rand’s “concrete bound mentality” (grabbing on to a specific and not necessarily relevant example—she’s against it) is a special case of availability bias.
nod But they both draw from a common wellspring of thought, and are influenced by many of the same formative works (having since developed themselves in greatly different directions). They’re both socialism, in the same sense that a platypus (lays eggs, sweats milk, senses electricity, has simple teeth) and a human (gives live birth to well-developed offspring, has dedicated milk glands, no electroception at all, complex teeth) are both mammals: it’s a fact of their origins. They’ve simply diverged substantially—but this divergence isn’t so great that it’s meaningless to speak of them as both forms of mammal (has hair, endothermic metabolism, produces milk, three middle ear bones, has neocortex, is of amniote clade—the critical bit is that these commonalities are not coincidental, they are not convergent traits).
This raises a problem I’ve seen in other forms.… is it fair to ask how an idea works out in practice?
Absolutely, but it’s not necessarily as simple as patternmatching to “claims label” and “is visible and obvious to me personally.” Especially when you’re dealing with stuff like religion, ideology, culture or politics, it can be hard to make any really meaningful statements that generalize usefully.
How does socialism work out in practice? It’s tempting for some folks to point to the USSR, but that’s just because it’s a big obvious thing with the word “Socialism” prominently emblazoned on it. The EU is pretty darn relevant there as well.
When most Westerners think “Islam”, they don’t think “polyandric, matrifocal, highly-educated pluralists comfortable with secularism” either, but the Minangkabau people outnumber al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban combined. Those latter have a lot more to do with the first things that spring to mind when Westerners hear the word “Islam” though.
What I’m saying is, “How does this work out in practice” is terribly vulnerable to the availability bias.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think socialism (State Communism) and socialism (western Europe—I’m not sure what the best name is for democracies with strong safety nets) are the same thing—they have extremely different practices and trajectories. I think this supports your point that you need to actually know something before you try to address the question of how an idea works out in practice.
If it’s any consolation, I don’t just wonder that sort of thing for social justice. I’ve thought how Atlas Shrugged, a novel which is an extended attack on crony capitalism, has led to people who support corporations in general.
Now that I think about it, Rand’s “concrete bound mentality” (grabbing on to a specific and not necessarily relevant example—she’s against it) is a special case of availability bias.
Social democracy.
nod But they both draw from a common wellspring of thought, and are influenced by many of the same formative works (having since developed themselves in greatly different directions). They’re both socialism, in the same sense that a platypus (lays eggs, sweats milk, senses electricity, has simple teeth) and a human (gives live birth to well-developed offspring, has dedicated milk glands, no electroception at all, complex teeth) are both mammals: it’s a fact of their origins. They’ve simply diverged substantially—but this divergence isn’t so great that it’s meaningless to speak of them as both forms of mammal (has hair, endothermic metabolism, produces milk, three middle ear bones, has neocortex, is of amniote clade—the critical bit is that these commonalities are not coincidental, they are not convergent traits).