Bravo! This was a concise and brilliant refutation of the kind of nonsense that is peddled in universities across the nation. I spent four years arguing these points in my undergrad anthro degree. They are based on Darwinian principles, applied without discernment to human endeavors. I found no professors willing to help me, since "group selection" was considered too complicated to form useful models. This is representative of the state of affairs in modern academia, where abstractions - often with zero grounding - are prioritized over reality. Your example of parrallel lines was right on.
And I love the info you provided on Nash. Apparently, he actually promoted cooperative game theory a great deal, as well as having many other fascinating ideas far outside of the mainstream. Wikipedia gave me some interesting avenues for further research about him: "Nash has suggested hypotheses on mental illness. He has compared not thinking in an acceptable manner, or being "insane" and not fitting into a usual social function, to being "on strike" from an economic point of view. He advanced views in evolutionary psychology about the potential benefits of apparently nonstandard behaviors or roles. Nash [also] developed work on the role of money in society. He criticized interest groups that promote quasi-doctrines based on Keynesian economics that permit manipulative short-term inflation and debt tactics that ultimately undermine currencies. He suggested a global "industrial consumption price index" system that would support the development of more "ideal money" that people could trust rather than more unstable "bad money." He noted that some of his thinking parallels that of economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, regarding money and an atypical viewpoint of the function of authority."
I am grateful for your work, and look forward to reading your book which I just acquired.
False ideas, as well as false ideological narratives that have been selected and promoted via so-called "scientific" theories and models - falsely compare, diminish, and level humans to an animal species. Such a narrow-minded depiction of us, humans, possesses a great danger; firstly for those who serve as an advocate and as well as to those that fall into a trap of believing in such false convictions and dogmas. Disregarding human goodness, selflessness, reason, and ability to create and a lot more is nothing more than stupidity, ignorance, and a self-destructive way of thinking - perhaps a symptom of "schizophrenia" as our medical scientists like to label things.
In Mirowski's Machine Dreams there is a reference to an experiment with students playing the prisoner's dilemma. It was only the economics students who ended up in the lousy outcome; all others opted for the cooperative solution. Maybe polisci or international relations practitioners have been similarly afflicted. It is a bit of the hammer syndrome: someone with a hammer will see all the problems in the world as nails.
Those "Game Theory" theorists - clearly never read Dostoevsky - as I first did as an undergraduate way back in 1970. Then again, in today's "woke" university settings I wonder if anyone still does read him. My ever evolving understanding of human psychology was produced in large part from the challenge posed by having to reconcile the clear evidence of both our routine human rationality AND OUR routine human irrationality. Such an "appreciation," rather than fostering black vs white thinking leads instead to an appreciation of the many "shades of grey" in both thought and behavior that comprise both our individual and our social worlds.
Most of my life has been spent within an American societal structure openly emphasizing and depending upon human "rationality" to create functioning institutional structures in spite of the limits to such an approach. Today, however, the oh so "woke" and "post-modern" university setting has churned out multiple generations of students who quite insistently demand the creation of institutional structures that instead enshrine "irrationality" at the heart of societal life - "gender theory" being a prime example.
It seems that rather than finding that delicate footing in which we can acknowledge both human rationality AND irrationality as givens in human psychology - with all the implications that suggests - that the current crop of academia graduates have instead simply declared a sort of holy war on material reality itself. At the opposite end of the pendulum of Uber-rationality, we now see the loudly proclaimed enshrining of irrationality - as evidenced by the idea that "self-identity" can trump material reality itself and somehow form the basis for legal and societal re-organization. Freud's concept of "the return of the repressed" comes to mind.
We are social creatures, led by elites who are narcissistic, and selfish desires is a completely a projection, yet in capitalism managed to the point of kleptocracy, we are forced to become competitive rather than cooperative. Cooperation is in our social being, which religion suggests in its creation of a unified spirit.
Bravo! This was a concise and brilliant refutation of the kind of nonsense that is peddled in universities across the nation. I spent four years arguing these points in my undergrad anthro degree. They are based on Darwinian principles, applied without discernment to human endeavors. I found no professors willing to help me, since "group selection" was considered too complicated to form useful models. This is representative of the state of affairs in modern academia, where abstractions - often with zero grounding - are prioritized over reality. Your example of parrallel lines was right on.
And I love the info you provided on Nash. Apparently, he actually promoted cooperative game theory a great deal, as well as having many other fascinating ideas far outside of the mainstream. Wikipedia gave me some interesting avenues for further research about him: "Nash has suggested hypotheses on mental illness. He has compared not thinking in an acceptable manner, or being "insane" and not fitting into a usual social function, to being "on strike" from an economic point of view. He advanced views in evolutionary psychology about the potential benefits of apparently nonstandard behaviors or roles. Nash [also] developed work on the role of money in society. He criticized interest groups that promote quasi-doctrines based on Keynesian economics that permit manipulative short-term inflation and debt tactics that ultimately undermine currencies. He suggested a global "industrial consumption price index" system that would support the development of more "ideal money" that people could trust rather than more unstable "bad money." He noted that some of his thinking parallels that of economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, regarding money and an atypical viewpoint of the function of authority."
I am grateful for your work, and look forward to reading your book which I just acquired.
Thank you Cynthia!
False ideas, as well as false ideological narratives that have been selected and promoted via so-called "scientific" theories and models - falsely compare, diminish, and level humans to an animal species. Such a narrow-minded depiction of us, humans, possesses a great danger; firstly for those who serve as an advocate and as well as to those that fall into a trap of believing in such false convictions and dogmas. Disregarding human goodness, selflessness, reason, and ability to create and a lot more is nothing more than stupidity, ignorance, and a self-destructive way of thinking - perhaps a symptom of "schizophrenia" as our medical scientists like to label things.
In Mirowski's Machine Dreams there is a reference to an experiment with students playing the prisoner's dilemma. It was only the economics students who ended up in the lousy outcome; all others opted for the cooperative solution. Maybe polisci or international relations practitioners have been similarly afflicted. It is a bit of the hammer syndrome: someone with a hammer will see all the problems in the world as nails.
Those "Game Theory" theorists - clearly never read Dostoevsky - as I first did as an undergraduate way back in 1970. Then again, in today's "woke" university settings I wonder if anyone still does read him. My ever evolving understanding of human psychology was produced in large part from the challenge posed by having to reconcile the clear evidence of both our routine human rationality AND OUR routine human irrationality. Such an "appreciation," rather than fostering black vs white thinking leads instead to an appreciation of the many "shades of grey" in both thought and behavior that comprise both our individual and our social worlds.
Most of my life has been spent within an American societal structure openly emphasizing and depending upon human "rationality" to create functioning institutional structures in spite of the limits to such an approach. Today, however, the oh so "woke" and "post-modern" university setting has churned out multiple generations of students who quite insistently demand the creation of institutional structures that instead enshrine "irrationality" at the heart of societal life - "gender theory" being a prime example.
It seems that rather than finding that delicate footing in which we can acknowledge both human rationality AND irrationality as givens in human psychology - with all the implications that suggests - that the current crop of academia graduates have instead simply declared a sort of holy war on material reality itself. At the opposite end of the pendulum of Uber-rationality, we now see the loudly proclaimed enshrining of irrationality - as evidenced by the idea that "self-identity" can trump material reality itself and somehow form the basis for legal and societal re-organization. Freud's concept of "the return of the repressed" comes to mind.
We are social creatures, led by elites who are narcissistic, and selfish desires is a completely a projection, yet in capitalism managed to the point of kleptocracy, we are forced to become competitive rather than cooperative. Cooperation is in our social being, which religion suggests in its creation of a unified spirit.
Wonderful lecture. It is a game being run in a circus. We hash out the archetpes of clowns in this godtype essay. https://godtype.substack.com/p/katie-hobbs-the-sad-faced-auguste
I imagine that as long as you live in a rational society, game theory can be applicable. Then again ...