This is my wife. She’s never undecided and has incredible intuition. I’m a gray thinker to the point of paralysis. When something comes up that we need to sort out, i feed factors and we walk the decision tree until we’re both happy. Works well lol
Counting a spoiled American kid childhood, 30 years of being spoon fed options that marketing felt fit the curve best wore thin.
I’ve become incredibly DIY and avoid socializing because it’s more of the same. Making music at home, learning, creating. I make tons of choices in those contexts all the time, building a new emotional vibe each time.
Picking a sushi joint for the thousandth time is just mind numbingly banal in comparison. And so I seem to have become “indecisive” to others, when internally I just don’t give a shit to go out for sushi again.
Another thing that a decade of painstakingly quantified decision making has taught me is that the metric details often don't actually matter that much and rarely lead you to a satisfying choice. My most recent example is the purchase of a Bosch dishwasher. I did quite a bit of looking and landed on one of the higher end series that did very well across the board in reviews. I hate it. The dishes come out with this weird sweaty feel to them, the racks suck, and the user interface is beyond horrendous (something that a week stay in a rental property confirmed is common to all Bosch appliances).
So I'm slowly working my way out of it, but I'm almost 50. Wish I would have had better constitution about this out of the gate.
I think there is something metaphysical about it; the 'grey' is the ether and the black and white is the materiality that comes out of it literally from force of will.
You can only create something by making a choice, choosing a path, 'making the quantum observation' which dissolves the ambiguity.
Too often we think of the 'solutions' as a form of 'clarity' ... when reality, 'clarity' might be just the force (or clarity) of vision more than anything.
Consider three rules of branding: consistency, authenticity, simplicity. The message resonates when it is consistently and repeatedly applied in a simple way, and there is some kind of 'truthiness' (i.e. authenticity) to it. Sometimes I think of a product roadmap, and all the crazy internal and external politics of it all, as a form of branding. It's a 'decision' (i.e. either black or white) reiterated among individuals such that they can resonate their various talents around it, pushing it into fruition.
So I started using a shortcut. Instead of following the arguments, I observe the arguments themselves. Am I trying to justify a yes or a no?
Saves a lot of time. Just do what in your gut you’ve already decided to do anyway.
No - not so that chance shall decide the affair, while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping.
- Piet Hein
You may be indecisive because you truly don't know enough about the options and need to do your research to make an informed decision. Don't overdo it, just do enough. How much is enough is not easy to say in general.
> Capitalism is enormously productive but has many limitations. Some socialist institutions actually work well in a capitalist economy, but pure socialism hasn’t tended to work at all.
But this is actually a counter-example. Most socialists (and certainly all of the originators and main theorists) would contend that socialism represents a pure qualitative break with capitalism, that socialism is at odds with capitalism in many ways (law of value, commodity production, class society) and that to speak of implementing "socialist policies" is worse than meaningless, it is a misunderstanding. They have some good reasons to say that socialism represents such a qualitative break with capitalism.
So from my point of view, you can start out thinking "gray" (most people uninformed on the scholarly work on the difference between capitalism and socialism take the point of view of the article) but when you look further, you actually see that it's black and white.
This example, at least, undermined the author's point. "Quantitative scale-based thinking" means that quality rarely enters the mix (except, perplexingly, in the example that "trying heroin once is bad"). Quantitative thinking is not always a perfect fit, because (1) it assumes the object under investigation is quantifiable, (2) it assumes the object is mathematically and formal-logically comparable, (3) quantitative models often simplify beyond how a qualitative model would (as an example, Samuelson's "commodity 1" and "commodity 2", or the presumption that inputs=outputs in Steedman).
Qualitative and quantitative thinking are both important, and the preference for quantitative over qualitative has become increasingly common; as a famous German economist once pointed out (in the criticism of Bentham's utilitarianism), quality logically preceeds quantity. If you don't know what you're talking about, its measurement will be a lot more difficult. This is the same argument levelled at Ricardo (the confusion of form, substance and magnitude into one monstrous mess).
For some reason this makes me think of Hegel and dialectical (subjects I have limited understanding of).
I also agree that quantitative reasoning has usurped qualitative reasoning and this might be due to quantitative reasoning actually being easier. If you define a scale with which to measure then it is really just a matter of defining how you score something, gathering the inputs and turning a crank to get to an answer. IMO, choosing the scale (and maybe to a less extent the scoring mechanism) seems to be the truly difficult part of the puzzle.
I would submit there isn't one. Furthermore any objective "facts" useful for such a metric have some basis on one theory or interpretation or another.
The article says:
> This is why quantitative and scale-based thinking is so important. But most don’t realize that quantitative thinking isn’t really about math; it’s about the idea that The dose makes the poison.
To adopt their words in response to your comment, what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems? Could one have identical numerical "doses" in different combinations of those systems? It's a useless, reductionist, and counterproductive way of thinking in my opinion.
Well, isn't this exactly what people try to do when comparing these systems? Number of deaths, number of people in poverty, number of products on the shelves in stores?
> Between Buddhism and Christianity?
You can count the number of atrocities perpetrated by each. The number of scandals involving their priests. The total number of adherents.
> what exactly is the numerical "dose" between qualitatively different systems?
That is the whole point of my post. Defining how to turn a qualitative measure into a quantitate measure is the real and only trick. I chose some arbitrary ones in response to your examples. You may choose different ones. Maybe you choose to measure capitalism and socialism based on some psychological happiness score defined as responses to some survey. Maybe you measure it by GDP. Choosing your measure is the real power.
Not necessarily. Qualitative models have been increasingly adopted, and most arguments from the socialist side of the debate concede that capitalism has greatly improved quantitatively measured standards of living, it is responsible for a huge range of products, and that 20th c. socialism lead to many deaths. Qualitative criticisms are the most popular today in political economy, namely, the work of Sen, Roemer, Vrousalis and others on qualitative (with some quantitative basis) concepts of "exploitation", "domination", "alienation", and "fetishism". Nevertheless, quantitative arguments are also abound, in particular debate over what classifies as "poverty", and the transformation of values to prices of production (usually formulated mathematically). The road to defining axiomitically concepts like "exploitation" still has "a million miles to go" (Veneziani and Yoshihara).
This area of criticism, in my opinion (and the opinion of Honkanen[0]), needs more quantitative reasoning, and qualitative thinking cannot simply brush aside the use of statistics, which is relevant in many (but not all) instances.
[0] Honkanen P. (2020) The Transformation Problem and Value-Form: Methodological Comments. In: Silver M. (eds) Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
All that shows, IMO of course, is there is some common ground between capitalists and socialists when defining some objective quantitative measures. In a sense, we first agree on the rules of some game (i.e. the quantitative indicators of our qualitative desires) and then we turn the crank of the mathematical machine to see what scores the best.
> qualitative thinking cannot simply brush aside the use of statistics, which is relevant in many (but not all) instances.
I agree on this but in a subtle way. Analogies are the worst but I'm going to do it anyway. It's like a boat that has both a rudder and an engine. In this analogy the rudder is qualitative reasoning and the engine is quantitative reasoning. We use qualitative reasoning to "pick a direction" and quantitative reasoning to "move towards the goal". I sometimes think both sides are missing the fact we need both. A rudder without an engine doesn't get anywhere and an engine without a rudder moves aimlessly.
My original argument was that the engine at this point is pretty well known: logic, science, math and computation. However, choosing good qualitative measures and then choosing good methods to convert them into quantitive measures is really difficult. You mentioned that quantifying "domination" or "exploitation" is tricky. I believe that choosing "domination" as your qualitative measure (before you even try to quantify it) is the really difficult thing. So often we go into quantitative mode with very little consideration why we chose the qualitative measures we are using.
It makes me think of Habermas and his work on communicative rationality (another topic I'm very weak on). I'm not sure that is the right tool but I think we need a set of agreed upon tools other than quantitative reasoning to help us solve disagreements on qualitative measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/commun...
https://www.quora.com/What-has-killed-more-people-communism-...
And the death count for "socialism" usually includes Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany, all of which were primarily nationalist governments - in the same way that North Korea is actually a very old-fashioned hereditary absolute monarchy decorated with Stalinist branding.
The closest economies to real socialism are the high-taxation, high-spending Scandinavian social democracies, which score higher than the US on educational attainment, business opportunity, life-expectancy, and educational attainment - but don't do nearly as well at generating billionaires.
The real foundation of social democracy is aggressive wealth redistribution and broad democratic access to policy - not state control. In reality capitalism is far more controlled than social democracy because it operates as a plutocracy that privileges a small demographic. This demographic has exclusive control over policy through lobbying, "funding" of representatives, and the creation and propagation of economic (i.e. "moral") narratives that benefit them - irrespective of party labels.
Against this background, the fact that academics may be debating what exploitation means is very much a side issue.
Close, but I would say that socialists don't see it as close enough. Sweden holds a strong form of liberal egalitarianism, as propounded by Rawls in his less 'socialist' writings. But even then, the socialism is beyond its horizon. There is a 'property-owning democracy', and no egalitarian distribution. The capitalist parts of Rawls, without the public ownership of MoP socialist stuff.
The championing of liberal egalitarianism as "good enough" leaves other questions unanswered. Is social democracy still exploitative? Dominating? Alienating? Environmentally damaging? Inefficient? Those questions hold for any form of capitalism, defined as a society in which capital's self-valorization is predominant, and where there is wage labour.
So the question is what kind of argument would justify not only going beyond old school 20th c. death capitalism, but social democratic capitalism, too. Only if you look into whether (1) capitalist societies are exploitative (2) there is a normative reason to do away with it, and the same with alienation, domination and environmental concerns - then there is a good reason for socialism.
Yes, but these would be statistics (subjectively determined and presupposing a set of values I might add) to determine whether one or another ideas were better than one another, and in what way.
The grey thinking in this article is just one big ideological blender. It implies that if we had A X Capitalism and (1-A) X Socialism, maybe that would be a sensical or desirable outcome. It does not say in any way how that is a coherent thing, either for those two specific models, or for models in general.
The depends on the question. You can compare Buddhism and Christianity in many ways, each with their own score. Are you saying 'which one is better for humanity'? Or 'which one will make my stoner friends think I'm rad?'?
if you were to compare which one has done more good/bad for humanity, than the score would be how much good or bad each one has done for humanity. You may say Buddhism improves the lives of it's adherents about twice as much as christianity on average. But Christianity has 20x as many adherents. But but Christianity is responsible for 10000x more deaths... etc. Then you just need to decide on the value of 'improving a persons life X amount' compared to 'killing X number of people' and do the math.
Of course, you typically don't get to the level of assigning numerical values to human life when forming your opinions most of the time. That's just the explanation of how these things are quantitatively 'scored' to try and answer your question - in practice it's a much more guesstimation-based system.
That's the kind of black and white thinking we need to do away with. "Purity" is fun for theorists to talk about but in practice we basically never want pure systems.
Anyhow, how can capitalism and socialism coexists? Well, it already does! Every democracy which levies taxes to run shared services is partly socialist, since these means of production are jointly owned. You can even see the taxes as a way for the people to extract profits from every venture, for example in Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it! And every country where you can start, run and profit from companies are partly capitalist. Hence all western nations are partly socialist and partly capitalist. They are on different parts of this spectrum.
For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money. Very few argue that we need less socialist roads and more capitalist roads with toll booths.
No (well, "no" from the point of view of scholars of socialism, whose opinion as experts on the topic matters more). Taxes are not "socialist", because "socialism" does not mean a safety net within capitalism. Means of production, as they are spoken of by philosophers, cannot be said to be "jointly owned"[0].
>Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it!
These do not count as productive capacity, but as help for workers, even if they were monetary equivalents (quantitatively), they are not qualitatively the same thing. In fact, one of the problems in the theory of exploitation is the question of whether someone who earns a very high income can be said to be "exploited". The compensation, it is held, is not (or less) relevant than the share of productive resources.
>For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money.
Socialism isn't about "fairness" or getting something back from the state[1]. Rather, it's about "class society". I don't mean to argue for or against socialism, but it's important to get the views right. Social safety nets are a social democratic measure within capitalist society. They are "social" but not socialist. Taxes existed in Marx's time (in some cases, higher than what we have now) - nevertheless, Marx called for the establishment of "socialism". Simple redistribution is not the socialist paradigm, except in rare incarnations.
[0] One of the conditions outlined by Roemer, as quoted in SEP: "If S were to withdraw from the society, endowed with its per capita share of society’s alienable property (that is, produced and nonproduced goods), and with its own labor and skills, then S would be better off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at the present allocation."
[1] "What is "a fair distribution"?
Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875)
Note the question is not "Are we entirely socialist?" but "are we partly socialist?". Yes, we are partly socialist. No, there are still things that are not jointly owned so we are not fully socialist. Hence the grey thinking instead of saying "We are not fully socialist so none of that matters!".
I already explained how and why to say "partly socialist" is false reasoning, because it assumes that "socialism" is some kind of sliding scale. Scholars of socialism do not consider it as such, socialism is defined to be diametrically opposed to capitalism, in the ways I have already mentioned. It is just like saying "Capital is partly a book." - no. It either is a book, or it isn't a book.
The most naive and uninformed idea of socialism, which is not in line with what any socialist considers it to be, is merely "the government providing things". That's not what is meant when we say "socialism", and redefining words contrary to expert opinion and tradition is no substitute.
No, not at all. In fact, I support local co-ops. My (and Marx's) only contention is that it is not sufficient to call this "socialism" or "socialism within capitalism", or "a socialist part of capitalism" because socialism is by definition the ending of the specific historical production of commodities and class society. A co-op is an admirable thing to run, but it's not "socialism".
A good read on this is “The Cognitive Distortions of Founders” by Michael Dearing https://link.medium.com/Ri20AKKuL2.