I don’t think knowing how to grow grain and bake bread helps you avoiding to turn a free market economy into a planned economy that mismanages resources.
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
Mao was the son of a farmer. Mao actually worked on his father farm instead of learning the piano and was bullied for his farmer background in high school.
I don’t think good aesthetics tell you about how to grow crops or bake bread.
I don’t think knowing how to grow grain and bake bread helps you avoiding to turn a free market economy into a planned economy that mismanages resources. Mao prohibited farm ownership and no amount of understanding the actual skill of baking or growing crops would have convinced him that private ownership is a good idea.
Lysenko’s success is also not simply about lack of farming knowledge but about having an intellectual climate that’s not well-fitted from separating true theories from those that aren’t.
What makes you so sure of this? More to the point, what makes you sure that a society that tied status more closely to such skills wouldn’t have promoted someone better than Mao to the top?
The point here is to get into the reasons why intellectual climates have the properties they do, with respect to the ability to develop and identify true theories.
To be sure, societies could have multiple failure modes, and I am open to the possibility that the USSR and Maoist China may have been bad for reasons entirely unconnected to the relationship between status and physical cognition. However, the populist character of both makes me doubt this, as populism seems anticorrelated with both good aesthetics and good science.
There have been enough revolutions and (temporarily successful) peasant revolts to demonstrate how that usually turns out. Lenin famously said that “Any cook should be able to run the country” and I don’t think it worked well.
As I said above,
Thus, by “a society that tied status more closely to such skills”, I do not mean the typical conditions leading to, and resulting from, a peasant revolt.
If only someone had thought to send Lenin to cookery school.
It’s more complicated :-D Like in French, most Russian nouns have masculine or feminine gender and IIRC in the original Russian the cook was specifically a female cook. And Lenin, sigh, was a cishet white male.
If https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin is to be believed then it’s more complicated still because what Lenin actually said was exactly the opposite.
A meme necessarily looks better than the actual source :-/
Mao was the son of a farmer. Mao actually worked on his father farm instead of learning the piano and was bullied for his farmer background in high school.
I don’t think good aesthetics tell you about how to grow crops or bake bread.