A commitment to being healthy and happy could be a good idea. The information from the Blue Zones could provide lots of useful ideas.
A commitment to love could also be a good idea. Love 2.0 book has scientific research in this field.
On a simpler note, you could commit to a long walk in nature with your wife every month or every fortnight. Find a nice trail and keep returning there for a nice slow walk. You could use this time to unwind or to calmly discuss what you could do about things.
we’re both of us well into politics-as-mindkiller territory here, and I don’t think prolonging the discussion is going to be useful in this venue.
I agree. I also discovered that my comments are down voted into oblivion.
I have to assume that my contributions to this forum are not yet of high enough quality.
Anyways… I’m grateful for your comments. They have been uncomfortable and made me think.
google says that the definition of greed is “intense and selfish desire for something, esp. wealth, power, or food.”
Prosocial behavior, or “voluntary behavior intended to benefit another”,is a social behavior that “benefit[s] other people or society as a whole,” “such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering.”
You are talking about a state that takes everything from everyone beyond what they “need”.
I never said anything about the state taking.
“Totalitarian” is exactly the right word for this. This is a vision of the state giving and the state taking away, where all belongs to the state and personal property is to be justified by a plea of need.
Again… you are projecting your vision of what I said but you did brought up an interesting idea… the idea of personal property. I don’t think land should be owned by people. If people don’t own the land, then it follows that houses should not be owned by people.
Do you see any way in which this could be implemented without totalitarianism?
I don’t agree with caps on individual wealth, and were I Swiss, I’d have voted against 1:12 even without seeing any of the so-called FUD.
Why not?
The only reason capitalism works is that the losing experiments run out of money.
That brake on failure is really important. When someone decides to Do Something and commits their resources to it, if it doesn’t work out, they have to stop. A government’s ability to carry on regardless is in comparison almost unlimited.
Is the defence budget of USA for the past 60 years an experiment that ran out of money?
We were talking about a new society, one that runs on rationality. Experiments in this kind of society could have very clear parameters for a brake.
I look at capitalist societies and what I see is oligarchies masquerading as capitalism. The game is rigged and people are too afraid to even dream of changing it because, in most cases… this is the only game they know OR… the other games are just as bad.
Is really capitalism the best way to handle education? Healthcare? Public transportation infrastructure? Defence?
To me, the stories with happy people “finishing paying their college loans” are horror stories. Stories with people getting charged thousands of dollars for simple medical procedures are insane. People maximising PROFITS out of selling weapons and military technology/services… is not the mark of a sane and healthy society.
I’m wise enough to know that giving people like myself the power to allocate all money isn’t the solution either. There are many things I don’t understand.
It doesn’t have to be black and white.… all to NIH OR all to projects like yours.
To me… investing money in exploration, in research is a defensible position and research… by its very nature is unknown territory. As long as you can make a rational argument for why you think the allocation of resources is warranted, you should have a chance of getting some. ;)
If that’s the reigning philosophy I don’t think humanity survives the next 200 years.
What do you think would happen?
So? You want to reduce the diversity of model of learning.
I have no idea how you derived this conclusion from what I’ve said.
Last week I attended the Berlin Bachata Congress. Bachata is a dance. Organizing such a context means flying world class teachers from all over the world to Berlin and paying for a location in which to held the event.
I can resonate with an example like this because I learn tango right now and yes… there are masters that could help one improve the technique BUT… I don’t see how this constitutes a valid example since is mixing current model with what I was exploring. If plane tickets cost thousand of euros, if space renting is highly expensive… and if everyone involved has a high enough imperative to get a lot of money… you will get something like this expensive bachata festival. If transportation, food and lodging would be free.… masters could come only to build status. An you will not need any permission from a centralized authority. Local events authority involved might be involved for scheduling some event locations…
It’s just that being a heretic is hard work.
I agree. I’m only at the beginning. One of the reasons I started to lurk around here is a need for clarity in my own thinking. I often am vague and expose half baked ideas. I hope that this will change in time.
That doesn’t change that Marx carries some responsibility for what happened.
This is like accusing a blacksmith for a murder someone did with a knife he created.
Responsibility lies with the ones who act in a destructive way or the ones who coerce others to act destructively.
Maybe NIH is not spending the money effectively. Maybe a rational discourse could make your way one of the official ways.
There are models of education where you become a partner once you understand the concepts. Something like Peer Instruction. You could have as a tutor a person from the same generation, a person who just happens to understand the concepts that you are trying to learn better. I did this for my friends with programming back in college.
Marx’s ideas were perverted by Lenin and the totalitarian mess we saw last century derived from that.
Also, I’m not advocating the destruction of the status quo but its transformation, its transcendence. I’m non-violent and I don’t believe in forced societies. My hope is that we will outgrow the old ways.
I agree with you. This is the world as we know it.
We are, however, exploring here. What would be the point of an exploration if we remain stuck in the old paradigms. Just because most of this world is a masked oligarchy where people with money control public policy does not mean that a more just and rational political representation can ever exist.
non sequitur.
Just because you view capitalism as a form of success it does not follow that greed has pro-social outcomes.
Links?
Start here:
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/
Then the success of capitalism must be a complete mystery to you.
Wouldn’t be more useful to just provide a valid counter example instead of mocking me?
In non-Toastmasters settings, these skills have been useful when I’m trying to talk to people who have different interests, or when I’m put on the spot to talk about something I feel like I don’t know a lot about.
This sounds like you became more sociable. Now I’m curious how would a sociable person be like to you? I mean… what is the line that separates the sociable from not sociable in your perspective?
What does “fidelity to the truth” mean in the context of ideology?
Think about a SF movie like Gravity, fidelity to truth is making sure the details are coherent with the way reality works, with the way we currently understand reality to work.
Science doesn’t tell you what your values should be.
In a certain regard this is true. Science doesn’t tell you if you should be a sociopath of a pro-social person. However, once the pro-social stance has been selected, science can point at what values have a track record of providing this pro-social outcome. Cooperation, compassion, forgiveness… this have documented outcomes. There are scientific studies regarding what is conducive to happiness and meaning. There is the whole field of eudaimonia studies that is clearly pointing towards specific values. It doesn’t tell you how to prioritise them but it sure points at what they should be.
Greed, altho a value to some… is not something that has pro-social outcomes (not to my knowledge).
I haven’t proposed a totalitarian state. This is something that you inferred from what I’ve wrote.
I was talking about a society with certain characteristics.
I was thinking more about a StarTrek kind of thing than an old soviet republic.
One practical, slow way in which I see this happening is by shifting the focus on cooperation in education and slowly limiting the massive accumulation of wealth together with strong regulations regarding ecological impact and labour compensation.
One very fine idea I found was in a Howard Gardner interview for BigThink (scroll down to ” What is the US getting wrong?” )
Another interesting approach was an initiative called 1:12 proposed in Switzerland. Unfortunately, that initiative got hit massively with FUD from the competition which was able to outspend it in terms of advertising 40:1.
Oh well… I’m totally ok on being downvoted on accounts of low quality of my comments however, I wasn’t really expecting people here to downvote comments just because they don’t agree with them. I have adjusted that belief now and will act with a little bit more caution.
I guess I did that :) but it was a good lesson. It pointed to the fact that I should refrain from speaking without having at least a reasonable model about what I am speaking about. :)