Scrotie's single-question political compass test

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DalaiLama wrote:

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deathflower wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

Something tells me Sen is going to care a little more about Child C than anyone else here...

Cheers, Scrotums. I was between books and this is perfect.

https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Justice-Amartya-Sen/dp/0674060474

Interestingly that is where I heard the 3 kids and a flute from. If you understand his theories of on justice and social actualization, you would think Sen probably does but would pick Child A instead. It is the choice that improve the quality of life for everyone.

Social Actualization is just another disguised caste system. Imagine that you are a farmer, and suddenly society tells you (and everyone else) it is illegal and immoral to eat the crops you raise. You and the other crop farmers lose money and power, and those banning your crops rise to the top of society.

Real history is a sad thing at times.

So is property right. Property rights are theoretical socially-enforced constructs. You have no Property right if the peasants rob from you without repercussions. Or complain to the bandit in a lawless land.

If I might engage with the original question for a moment, because I feel like doing something less infuriating for a bit here...:

Obviously the question is loaded as hell, and mandates a lot of assumptions about each child's situations and capabilities - and also is very obviously slanted to guide individuals to Choice B and make anyone whose natural inclination might be A or C feel bad about that choice. It's a form of intellectual bullying, almost, and has very little basis in any sort of reality...but that's what makes it an interesting mental conundrum, provided one can get past the idea of personally identifying with a given stance and believing it says anything about them.

To really dig into it, we need to make some fundamental assumptions about each child and discard a few obvious solutions:

-Child A is, for whatever reason, either unable or unwilling to teach Child B or Child C how to play the flute. She is the only one who will ever be able to play the flute, and she can only play it if she is in possession of it.

-Child B is, for whatever reason, either unable or unwilling to teach Child A or Child C how to build their own flute, or the group as a whole is unable to secure more flute materials. This is the only flute that will ever exist for this particular group of children.

-Once assigned, the flute cannot be reassigned - no rotation, timeshare, or any-other-sharing system can be implemented. The flute is given to a single specific child, who will then retain full and total ownership of that flute for the rest of their life.

-Selling the flute, or otherwise profiting off of one's ownership with it, is not permitted. As above - once assigned, the flute is assigned for life and cannot be reassigned by any means. The Free Market does not exist for these children - one of them gets a flute, and that one keeps the flute.

The assumption behind this question can thusly be summarized as: One flute, given once and only once, to one child. If we want to address the idea behind the rigged test anything like fairly, we need to discard take-a-third-option ideas and not allow ourselves to be impressed with our own cleverness. This isn't a real-world situation; real world fuzzy logic answers don't accomplish anything.

With all that being said? The correct answer is to assign the flute to Child A.

Neither Child B nor Child C can make effective use of the flute. They can content themselves with their ownership of it and having defeated their rivals for the One Flute to Toot Them All, but they cannot utilize it to improve either their own personal situation or the situation of the group as a whole. Child A is able to make full use of the flute, which can be used to improve the lives of both Child B and Child C as well as her own, as well as potentially allowing the children to collectively petition for more flutes by demonstrating useful/pleasing skills, should whatever Vault-Tec rep who is performing this surreal experiment ever relent on their rules. The flute is useless in the hands of Child B, who will learn a valuable lesson - don't spend time and resources pursuing the creation or attainment of something you gain no benefit from. The flute is equally useless in the hands of Child C, who will also learn a valuable lesson - sympathy only stretches so far, and a complete lack of ability accompanied by the lack of willingness to attain ability results in a squalid life. Child A, who possesses a valuable skill, serves as a demonstration to both Child B and Child C that skill is rewarded, while Child A should not forget that her skill is only able to be utilized because of Child B's own skills with crafting.

Ideally, of course? Child A teaches Child B and Child C to play the flute, and Child B teaches Child A and Child C how to build a flute. In this case, education is used to maximize the potential of all three children, leading to the greatest possible good as all three children gain the benefit of both of the group's available skillsets. But this is specifically built to be a nonideal situation.

In this nonideal situation, the best answer is to assign the flute to the individual capable of doing the most good with it, which would be Child A. Secondarily, if this is somehow not possible, the flute should be assigned such that the assignment deals the least damage, which would be to leave it in the hands of Child B. To assign the flute to Child C would be to turn Child B (and Child A, for that matter) into Child C - B would then be the one with nothing in the world. Harsh as it is to say, and as nonsensical as it is from any kind of realistic standpoint, Child C is clearly better able to cope with having nothing than Child A or Child B are, seeing as he's managed to get along fine with nothing so far.

Now of course the question is specifically designed to denigrate and shame the idea of assigning the flute to Child C, who has neither the craftsman's claim on the fruit of her labors nor the artist's claim to the tools of her trade. In turn, this is used to denigrate and shame the idea of any sort of humanitarian redistribution of wealth in the real world - "if they didn't earn it and they can't use it, why give it to them?!" This assumes that any such situation is static - as laid out above, no child will ever be able to learn new skills or acquire new materials, or otherwise improve their situation. They are as they are and they will never be any other way, which is a fundamentally broken idea. If this is the case? We're not even talking about human beings anymore - we're talking about child-shaped homunculi programmed with only the one specific thing they can do, and there's no correlation at all to any sort of real-world viable belief position.

Or, to TL;DR for the inevitable batch of folks who'll just snip at me anyways: Child A first, Child B second, and the question is so far removed from anything resembling reality that it becomes useless as a 'one question compass test' - but it's an interesting enough intellectual exercise to pick apart.

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1453R wrote:

we need to make some fundamental assumptions about each child and discard a few obvious solutions:

1. Child A is, for whatever reason, either unable or unwilling to teach Child B or Child C how to play the flute. She is the only one who will ever be able to play the flute, and she can only play it if she is in possession of it.

2. Child B is, for whatever reason, either unable or unwilling to teach Child A or Child C how to build their own flute, or the group as a whole is unable to secure more flute materials. This is the only flute that will ever exist for this particular group of children.

3. Once assigned, the flute cannot be reassigned - no rotation, timeshare, or any-other-sharing system can be implemented. The flute is given to a single specific child, who will then retain full and total ownership of that flute for the rest of their life.

4. Selling the flute, or otherwise profiting off of one's ownership with it, is not permitted. As above - once assigned, the flute is assigned for life and cannot be reassigned by any means. The Free Market does not exist for these children - one of them gets a flute, and that one keeps the flute.

Numbers mine.

1,2. I agree short-term, but disagree long-term.

At the root of your subrule here is the assumption that knowledge is not ever created but only passed down from teacher to student; this is an infinite regress falacy. Obviously there must be at least one person who learned to play the flute without being taught, or how to build a flute without being shown, and thus it's possible for others to repeat that learning.

However, the shorter the timeframe, the less likely it is such learning will occur (even if A/B are willing to teach others). The question remains what to do with the flute until then. Let's just say that for right now A is the best (but not necessarily only) fluteplayer and B is the best (but not necessarily only) flutemaker.

3. When you arrive at this problem, this is what the children are unsuccessfully trying to do. In plain language the image states: "The three children are fighting over the flute." They clearly lack whatever skills they need to share the flute without the situation descending into disagreement and potentially violence. If they had the ability to share nicely with each other, there'd be no reason they couldn't, but the fact that they don't is implied by the problem itself.

Again, maybe they could learn eventually, but there's still the question of what to do in the meantime.

4. I adamantly resist this notion. Why should the child you give the flute to be precluded from choosing a flute to give the child to? That's precisely what you're choosing, what you're doing. You're telling the recipient of the flute they cannot do what ypu just did? Absolutely not. As long as it doesn't involve immediate sharing, it's just fine to assume sale of the flute is fine.

And the part about not being allowed to profit off the flute if one owns it... egads, what a toxic concept. So you're saying that, if A gets the flute, she cannot use that flute as part of her occupation. That's fucked up.

Economics isn't necessarily monetary, you know. Everything we do -- everything -- is weighed according to how much the probable benefits exceed the probable costs, according to that person's particular valuations. Trying to get rid of profit motive is functionally equivalent to trying to get rid of choice itself.

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Numbers mine.

1,2. I agree short-term, but disagree long-term.

At the root of your subrule here is the assumption that knowledge is not ever created but only passed down from teacher to student; this is an infinite regress falacy. Obviously there must be at least one person who learned to play the flute without being taught, or how to build a flute without being shown, and thus it's possible for others to repeat that learning.

However, the shorter the timeframe, the less likely it is such learning will occur (even if A/B are willing to teach others). The question remains what to do with the flute until then. Let's just say that for right now A is the best (but not necessarily only) fluteplayer and B is the best (but not necessarily only) flutemaker.

If we're considering an immediate solution for an immediate problem, then one cannot consider what skills any of the children might spontaneously create, or even learn from the others, as learning takes time the solution does not have.

If we're considering a long-term solution, the problem dissolves because one assumes the children will grow up and learn to cooperate, or will end up dead because they're all nasty little shits that will likely murder each other.

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3. When you arrive at this problem, this is what the children are unsuccessfully trying to do. In plain language the image states: "The three children are fighting over the flute." They clearly lack whatever skills they need to share the flute without the situation descending into disagreement and potentially violence. If they had the ability to share nicely with each other, there'd be no reason they couldn't, but the fact that they don't is implied by the problem itself.

Again, maybe they could learn eventually, but there's still the question of what to do in the meantime.

As above - given the parameters of the issue, any attempt to institute any sort of resource sharing is pointless as it does nothing save defuse the entire question. If resource sharing is allowed, the problem evaporates and ceases to be meaningful.

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4. I adamantly resist this notion. Why should the child you give the flute to be precluded from choosing a flute to give the child to? That's precisely what you're choosing, what you're doing. You're telling the recipient of the flute they cannot do what ypu just did? Absolutely not. As long as it doesn't involve immediate sharing, it's just fine to assume sale of the flute is fine.

And the part about not being allowed to profit off the flute if one owns it... egads, what a toxic concept. So you're saying that, if A gets the flute, she cannot use that flute as part of her occupation. That's fucked up.

Economics isn't necessarily monetary, you know. Everything we do -- everything -- is weighed according to how much the probable benefits exceed the probable costs, according to that person's particular valuations. Trying to get rid of profit motive is functionally equivalent to trying to get rid of choice itself.

The 'no selling' rule is a component of the 'no sharing' rule, because without it you're sabotaging the question more than you already are. If the resource-sharing, humanitarian/communal option of Everybody Shares is artificially disallowed, then the coldly capitalist, open-market solution of Who Builds, Owns should also be disallowed. If the one is disallowed but not the other, then the question is not a question so much as it is a club with which free-market folks can attempt to beat other people's opinions to death with. After all, you've spoken yourself on the issue of economic specialization and how necessary it is to modern civilization, and yet here we are trying to discard economic specialization as an idea here. Child A's flute-playing talents are useless unless she has a flute to play, this is correct. Child B's flute-building talents are equally worthless without anyone to play her flutes. A flute that makes no music is a funny-shaped stick; it has no value and no purpose.

If Child B retains the flute but does not sell it, then all three children are reduced to Child C's state - no music, no nothing. If Child B retains the flute, then sells it to Child A, one must ask what Child A is using to pay. The only thing she's assumed to have in this equation is her flute-playing skills, which Child B clearly does not value if she's unwilling to part with the flute in the first place. You end up in a situation with three sad children and no songs.

The engines of production are meaningless without those who use what is produced, and end users have nothing without the engines of production. A flutemaker is destitute in a land with no flutists, and a flutist is no such thing with no flute. One cannot decouple economic specialization from this equation without being (more) disingenuous than the problem already is.

Does Child B's "I made it so it's mine!" claim to the flute have weight? Certainly. Does that weight outweigh Child A's claim of "no one else can use it so it should be mine!" In this specific Vault-Tec Social Experiment situation, I don't believe it does. After all, if these children had money and resources with which to engage in free-market buying and selling, then why the hell is Child A not simply commissioning a second flute for herself and getting out of the issue completely? Why is Child C destitute and talentless if resources exist that could be used to elevate him from that state?

I refuse to accept the rightist Rapture-esque "is Child B not entitled to the sweat of her brow?" reasoning on this issue that attempts to railroad individuals into answering "well the only choice is Child B so I suppose I should be a flaming cutthroat realpolitik capitalist now". In the situation supplied/implied by the problem, the best choice is the one that allows the greatest joy from the single resource allocated to the three children, which would be giving Child A the ability to play music for herself and her fellows. If you allow for a capitalistic option for free-market bartering with resources not named in the problem? You're outside the scope of the problem and pushing an answer based on your own agenda, not based on the actual parameters of the problem.

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1453R wrote:

If the resource-sharing, humanitarian/communal option of Everybody Shares is artificially disallowed, then the coldly capitalist, open-market solution of Who Builds, Owns should also be disallowed. If the one is disallowed but not the other, then the question is not a question so much as it is a club with which free-market folks can attempt to beat other people's opinions to death with.

Really? Do you think this is strawmanning policy positions?

In the real world, have you ever seen a politician arguing that we should all just share? Rarely do you see talk of somebody be given resources with the understanding that they later return what they're given. There are some examples, such as federal student loans, but the vast majority of such proposals are 1) about permanent transfer of ownership and 2) not supported by free-trade advocates.

If what you were saying were true, we'd be seeing a very different theme among proposals from the Left. We wouldn't see arguments for food stamps; we'd see arguments for "low-interest" government-subsidized financing for grocery purchases. We wouldn't see giant government subsidies to Washington's favorite corporations; we'd see government investment in and partial ownership of those corporations, and a government that expects to get back every penny.

I don't know for sure about you individually. Maybe you believe that those who receive generosity have a moral obligation to look at it as a debt to be repaid in full. But you're not going to ever convince me that such a perspective is representative of mainstream policy proposals. This isn't a strawman, my friend.

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1453R wrote:

After all, you've spoken yourself on the issue of economic specialization and how necessary it is to modern civilization, and yet here we are trying to discard economic specialization as an idea here. Child A's flute-playing talents are useless unless she has a flute to play, this is correct. Child B's flute-building talents are equally worthless without anyone to play her flutes. A flute that makes no music is a funny-shaped stick; it has no value and no purpose.

If Child B retains the flute but does not sell it, then all three children are reduced to Child C's state - no music, no nothing. If Child B retains the flute, then sells it to Child A, one must ask what Child A is using to pay. The only thing she's assumed to have in this equation is her flute-playing skills, which Child B clearly does not value if she's unwilling to part with the flute in the first place. You end up in a situation with three sad children and no songs.

The engines of production are meaningless without those who use what is produced, and end users have nothing without the engines of production. A flutemaker is destitute in a land with no flutists, and a flutist is no such thing with no flute. One cannot decouple economic specialization from this equation without being (more) disingenuous than the problem already is.

You are correct that, the more economic specialization is applied, the higher the standard for ability rises. As economic competition increases, a 1-in-10 flute player goes from being a viable entertainer for a family to being utterly out-competed by superior players.

However, economic specialization requires trade, which you've almost entirely prohibited. The only exception is trade explicitly approved by the central planners, which in this problem is represented by the person answering the question. You are the force compelling the supply (B) to meet demand (A).

Which got me thinking; Bc isn't really a properly capitalist position. I forget who it was earlier in the thread who said Bc represented a more Communist outlook, but perhaps they have a point; caring not one bit about economic demand, and instead ensuring supply first while distributing according to need second, is perhaps a more practical socialism than Cb. Instead, Ab and Ba are the proper capitalist positions, as they value supply and demand as the two higher priorities, in some order.

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1453R wrote:

I refuse to accept the rightist Rapture-esque "is Child B not entitled to the sweat of her brow?" reasoning on this issue that attempts to railroad individuals into answering "well the only choice is Child B so I suppose I should be a flaming cutthroat realpolitik capitalist now".

Oh, that much is crystal clear. What's dubious is how you rationalize such a decision to yourself.

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鬼殺し wrote:

I don't take it seriously, but that's what you've described.

Way, way too much Incursion for you...

What are you talking about? She's doing those savages a favour! The toolshed is where they deserve to be.*

*The toolshed is 100 meters by 100 meters and is filled with pillows, snacks, and toys.

Oh now, it's wise to assume people have a worst and dowse for it.

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鬼殺し wrote:

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erdelyii wrote:

So,

Question:

answers, on tablet at 12.20am in bed because you're L'Oreal.

aprons: wiki, but i chased the source for ya.

HIstoryofClothingApronsPracticalandDecorativeFashionClassics

Carpentry fangirl: what it sounds like. context is dad left when she was a toddler, he was a carpenter and what little she remembers is of their time in his workshop. Mum is a psychologically abusive monster so the girl has an unusually positive reaction to all things carpentry. Especially the sensation of hammering something. Anything, as it may turn out.

Do rec this Sen book. Yeah, he married rich and was born into an educated caste but I am sure he has seen his share of remediable injustices...

and yeah, if law and justice were the same thing we wouldnt have heroes in the Campbellian sense. Speaking of, Netflix just added all of The Power Of Myth. This kind of blows my mind!

...this thread also had me fixated on pro recorder videos for an hour. Turns out theyre real...

Bouncy waves and beams. Merci beaucoup, it's appreciated.
The tablet didn't quite link. Again?

Ah. I got that but at the same time fangirl is not exactly period. I can't help but think of this, but it might be 45% the gun thread. Still, "unusually positive reaction" in the context of her parents and memory of you writing about reading a book at present about dissociative identity disorder evokes some grey mater splatter. I don't know if your protag dissociates, but the darkness of a shattered childhood sounds present.


Dovetail joints?

I might check it out - Justice is an interesting topic. As is possession, sparked by the post above yours. Did you know that early land sales in England when conveyancing evolved had to include physical handing over on the land of a clod of earth? You couldn't buy property from London without travelling out (I suppose an agent did it) for the ritual.

I didn't mean that Sen's wealth and status is a bad thing. I thought it was interesting. When people can afford to be indifferent, even callous, and choose to care, it's compelling evidence of character. His wife probably even more so.

If law and justice were the same thing would we have no villains, too? On netflix?! I've not seen that series. It's been a long time since I read any Campbell. My fave was "Creative Mythology", but of course "Hero..." is classic. Funnily enough I picked up this this week at the local op shop. The sticker inside the cover says The Filmmaker's Bookshop ... detailed address ...Fortitude Valley QLD 4006. I think I'll watch an episode of the series, for starters.

Fab Four. Made me check it out. Good lord. I just hit Super Mario 'fraid I'm out that high pitch is too much.