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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.workstoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comBlue MAGA
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    5 days ago

    I’m all about a federated commune of communes, seriously, but at scale how is that really much different? You can’t have billions of people living on the planet, or hundreds of millions in a country, without some kind of coordination. It’s not practical for millions of people to vote on every little detail, you’ve still got to have focused representatives to, at minimum, collect information into policy that can be voted on in the first place.

    Really the only two options, barring authoritarianism, are direct democracy or some kind of elected representatives. Direct democracy doesn’t really work for most considerable topics (agricultural production, electric grid installation, hospital equipment, etc.). Even if people knew enough about the subject to make informed decisions, most people won’t bother engaging. So we’re inevitably left with some kind of representative democracy, councils don’t really eliminate the fact of electing representatives, or the consequences when certain demographics over or underperform at the polls.


  • I’d say more “select from” than “churn out”. It’s not about generating a hypothesis, it’s about having a collection of hypotheses and deciding which should be your default until additional evidence is provided.

    Hanlon’s razor says “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”, and “adequately” is pulling at least as much weight as “never”. If stupidity becomes a less adequate explanation, nothing stops you from considering malice as an alternative.

    People use things wrong all the time, sometimes the vast majority of the time (e.g. “literally”). Just because people use a concept pseudologically doesn’t make it intrinsically pseudological.


  • But razors aren’t supposed to be logic in the first place. They’re not objective analytical tools to arrive at a conclusion, because they weren’t designed to be. They’re framing tools to help establish an initial hypothesis.

    Occam’s razor doesn’t claim that the simplest explanation is true, it merely says it’s the most practical assumption, all else being equal. If additional data provides more support for a more complicated explanation, Occam’s really doesn’t require you to cling to the simpler one.

    Similarly Hanlon’s razor doesn’t claim that stupidity is universally a better explanation than malice, only that is the most practical assumption, all else being equal. It does not require you to ignore patterns of behavior that shift the likelihood toward malice.