I think that within the subset of United States’s aggression against the Native American population, there were many instances where fully integrated people were subsequently persecuted and eliminated. Some of it was at the “frontiers”, yes. But some of it was shopowners, millers, brewers...people who had fully adapted and in fact thrived within the europeanized colonies and later states.
This was still happening in the 1950′s and 60′s as well, with the flooding of native lands in the Dakotas, etc, where fully “Americanized” communities were eliminated through forced relocation.
simplyeric
Karma: 160
I’m of the mind that politically, in the US at least, we don’t seem to learn from this. The truth is, indeed, revealed....but the confusion remains and the errors continue.
There are many who disagree with me about that...
but that’s because they’re confused AND in error.
(ok ok I kid on that last part...)
“And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.” —Martin Niemoeller
I think that quote speaks a little about the worst enemies within us, in purely clinical terms, that what’s in the best interest of those with whom you don’t necessarily explicitly associate yourself may also be in your own best interest.
The thing to keep in mind about the Jewish Holocaust is that it wasn’t particularly unusual. It was unusual mostly in its location: it was rare to carry out such large scale atrocities ″in Europe″. Exterminations had been carried out by various states upon people in every other part of the world. Some were absolute, and entire races were exterminated. Hitler had great admiration for how the United States dealt with its native population. Sweden exterminated slaughtered whole groups in Africa. The list is not as short as we’d like it to be.
An interesting (and depressing) book: Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist
What I took from this book is that the enemy that is the holocaust situation is within us. The Jewish Holocaust was (unfortunately) not an outlier, but rather was/is in our culture or genes or humanity (I’m not sure I know which, although I tend towards the genetics).
There might be a strong chance that horses and other animals would draw their gods as having human form. Humans tend to protray their gods as being either equal or higher than humanity. Animist gods are protrayed as having characteristics that surpass humans: speed, wisdom, patience, etc. based on the characteristics of that animal. Alternately, sun gods, storm gods, etc.: higher powers.
Some wild horses would have horse gods or weather gods or wolf gods. Some might have human gods, depending on their interaction with humanity.
I’d imagine that domesticated horses would have human gods, some benevolent and some malignant, or both. And some domesticated horses would go “through the looking glass” and develop a horse-god of redemption, with prophecies of freeing them from the toil and slavery of domestication, based on some original downfall of horse-dom that led to them being subservient to humans.
Or something like that.
I’m not sure that’s true. The issue isn’t what a person “thinks”...it’s what a person ultimately concludes. A scientist must think for itself in order to hypothesize, no? I think science goes wrong when scientists conclude for themselves, in the face of the actul facts on the matter.
I think what is being referenced above is how to separate information from who said it, and how.
Although I just realized that I just referred to my profession as “non-traditional”, and was complicit in the pairing of my profession to stage magic.
Hmm...
NYC based architect (active in the profession) with experience teaching computer drafting and technical drawing, computer modeling (3d modeling and some rendering), as well as various aspects of design and technical problem solving...
What happens out there in the hurly-burly is not a “zero-sum” or “constant-sum” game. Specifically: it’s not a “game” at all. Those games are distillations and models used for testing behavior. This tells us certain things about how people react and interact, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Going for relative makes sense when you can’t take, you can’t (necessarily) earn, you can’t (in the short term) increase/generate. But you CAN win by destroying. You destroy your opponents resource, thereby “increasing” your wealth in a relative sense. It’s why we bombed weapons plants during WW2, no? And to an extent, it’s why they salted the earth....
I guess I need your analysis in a real world example, because I think we are talking too much about the “game” model. If I kill your cattle, or I salt your earth, what is the sum? What is the constant? What is the bias? My point is: the sum is negative, there is no constant, and the bias is towards “gratification”.
I don’t think killing my competitors cattle comes from an inherent evolutionary-economic analysis...I think it comes from “doing this releases endorphines in my brain in the short term, I see his wealth destroyed and that seems good”.
The bias is simply “relative success”...I win by gaining more, by losing less, or by making him lose more than me. It’s all very short term and emotional.
Of course we need to be able to value lives and trade them off against other resources; we do it all the time when we make policy or safety decisions.
I think the issue of lives in the context of “sums” is this: how many lives did “we” lose, compared to how many lives did “they” lose, in order to come to a conclusion of the conflict in and of itself. The sum is only self-referential....what happens afterwords is not relevant to the argument.
e.g. in a $10 zero sum experiment, the “winner” leaves with $9 and goes and buys crack on the street. The “loser” takes his/her $1 and buys a winning lottery ticket.
The long-term winning and losing after a war is not quantifiable, because there are no controls. Too many decisions, laws, random chance, weather events, could have taken things in one direction or another...who’s to say?
Well, the relevant fact about zero-sum games is that their sum is constant
I’m not sure that the sum of “wealth” is constant, in a negative sum game. The willful destruction of someone else’s wealth/resources does not result in a constant sum...that wealth is destroyed.
So the point is, there are zero-sum games, and non-zero-sum-games,and the question is where does the bias lie, at any given time?
What about the notion of a “negative sum” bias? I’m sure there is an appropriate technical term. The point being: what about the act of decreasing overall wealth as an act of personal enrichment, or of “relative improvement”?
For example, if I am in competition for a resource like grazing land, if I kill my neighbor’s cattle it leaves more resources for my enrichment...my wealth might increase even if overall wealth decreases. (this is something of a corollary to “Tragedy of the Commons”)
Alternately, if I am in competition for a resource like overall prestige, if I kill my neighbor’s cattle, I have more relative to him, even if my wealth is unchanged and overall wealth is decreased.
As a third issue, in relation specifically to civil war, there is “revenge bias”. Do we have more evolutionary bias towards summation or wealth issues? Or is it more about “give me my endorphines”? When we feel slighted, we will destroy things because the act of it makes us feel better.
Adrenaline trumps cortisol, is the evolutionary imperative here. Bad conditions, or bad actions, result in personal stress. Nothing relieves stress like violence, and revenge is especially sweet.
All three of these, in the end, are about “how good do you feel as a result of an act”. Extrapolating it to economic considerations might be going too far. The evolutionary imperative is more simple: the specific short term acts have physiological results, which are more tangible (in an evolutionary sense) than long term “wealth issues” (even while the long term wealth issue can reinforce the short term act as well).
Heck, ever see a cat pee on a computer as an act of “rebellion”? Where’s the summation of wealth there? The act of rebellion pre-exists the human condition.
This might sound weird, but: internet chat rooms (is that what “Second Life” is for nowadays?). I know chat rooms have a reputation, but I’ve read that they’ve been shown to have potential for actually increasing social skills (I’m searching for the relevant article, but I know I read it in a journal over a year ago).
But, you have to be proactive about it. And of course discerning.
a. You have to find the right venue a.1. chat rooms have a reputation for a reason a.2. you need to go to a venue where everyone is not there to talk about what you typically talk about.
b. You have to be conscious about what you are doing:
b.1. not talking to people who are into what you are into (somewhat redundant to a.2.) b.2 you have to be self-aware of the process...what is working, what isn’t b.3. you have to try to step out of your “comfort zone” in order to learn new approaches, new social skills, as it wereThe thing is, people are there to talk...so, seek out those people, and talk.
I’m not saying it’s “easy”...it’s just one idea.
fair enough. Rats.
“Like any dogma, it is honored far more in the breach than in the observance.”
-Benoit Mandelbrot
Well, I’m being a little postmodern, but how often have you heard people refer to themselves? Not quite ‘i told you so’ but in a similar vein. Pundits do this a lot. “well if you recall, last year I said xy&z, and look what happened?”. It’s the falacy related to the fact that, of all the possible outcomes, at least ONE person will probably be right. But, that fact is purely casual/trivial. I just found it poetic that one of the rules of the thread is ‘do not quote yourself’… Clearly that’s an issue that not all people recognize.
not trying to be glib here, but:
“• Do not quote yourself.” −4wnoise
It might be worth considering what answers you give now that might be different than ones you gave 7 years ago. I know I took one of these back in college, and probably every 5 years or so I’ve revisited it, each time never recalling my previous result (what does THAT say about my personality?).
But it struck me this time that some answers I gave this time would have been different 5 years ago. Enough that I probably would have been rated a different alphabet.
For the record: ENFP (slight, distinct, moderate, slight).
Like the sun over course of the day, our luminousity and spectrum change over time, from the blue tints of dawn to the harsh light of day, and again the blues towards dusk if I recall correctly, followed by gruesome darkness.
Anyway forgive my lyricism, but you catch my drift (although some claim that people never ‘fundamentally’ change, I disagree).
I wonder if there’s a way to measure how an individual is trending over the years, probably by comparing a series of tests over the years (although I think the act of taking thr tests repeatedly would tend to increase introspection, in the manner of observation effecting the outcome).
Trust me here that I am not defending the Soviet Union in terms of any moral or ultimate economic success (I have ties to a “Former Soviet Republic” and know the failings on both accounts)...but it should be noted that the rate of growth of the Soviet economy, and the rate of improvement of quality of life, outpaced that of Western Europe and the US from time of the revolution to about the late 50′s early 60′s (give or take).
It should be noted that Russia at the time of the revolution was barely “developed” and was fully in the grips of a system based on serfdom bordering on (if not actually equivalent to) slavery. It was, in common parlance, “backwards”. They were coming from quite the depths, and made great strides.
In doing so, they brought their standard of living up, and their level of “development” up, while managing to bring their agricultural production down. Sooner or later it was all a diminishing return, but the Soviet system in the early years was at least defensible on certain grounds.
Ultimately that system did not succeed, but it points the notion that different systems might be better for different things. What might have happened had the Soviets edged towards capitalism more in the manner of recent China, or if they had not bankrupted themselves on military spending? (and by extension, what can we as capitalists learn from that last point?)
The phrasing might be better in a different direction:
″...getting them to admit that Scandinavia is not doing something inherently wrong with it’s high tax system, given that they have relatively high happiness and quality of life.”
(in that right-wing conservatives state that high taxes inherently will cause reduction of standard of living/happiness)
Maybe a more salient example than my integrated Native Americans: Protestants v. Catholics.
In certain circumstances it was simply war and/or strife.
(“simply”)
But, in situations where both groups were fully native, there were situation where one group would try to eliminate the other through legislation, deportation, and also extermination.