We'll resume our observation of the animal kingdom shortly. For now, we turn our gaze back to humanity.
Humans are culture agents. Culture, as a function of genotype, encourages the promulgation of any memes which increase the likelihood of genetic success. This does not have to occur at the level of the individual; after all, it does not occur at the level of the gene itself in any scenario. Because "nature" is inefficient, its causes rarely result in a "kernel" mechanism being transported in the absence of impurities. To any particular gene, your body is the food to its vitamin or mineral: Waste is assumed to come along for the ride. This, of course, contrasts immensely against our technology, but that's another topic for another time.
Although no living CEO, marketing analyst, economist, systems engineer, or architect would ever fathom doing this with specifics, culture, as a function of the natural world, will do whatever it takes to get genetically beneficial memes into the future -- even if it means the unsuccessful reproduction of the originator or original promoter of the memes. In short, whether you directly benefit from your own ideas is irrelevant to their success within your social group.
Nevertheless, most people tend to believe that their ideas benefit them personally, even where they objectively do not, or where there is some ounce of something beneficial, but nothing substantive to the point of making the idea relatively beneficial. This is a huge problem which essentially underpins why individual humans cannot be trusted to rule themselves, preside over others, or make useful modifications to existing systems: As agents of culture, they are unwittingly participating in that deterministic, subatomic foray -- an abstraction independent of time, and thus unchangeable -- with predominant strands of DNA as its core mechanism of cause and effect.
Why should we trust ourselves to make decisions regarding what's best for us, what will most effectively reduce our pleasure to suffering ratio? We were born with brains designed for use in a "middle" world -- not the world of atoms, and not the world of black holes -- as depicted on the African Savannah. We're good at simple calculations like whether the risk in hunting a mammoth is worth the reward in a particular case, but we're terrible at determining whether our career paths are most likely to make us happy. We're good at carving lion gods from ivory, but we're terrible at counting to a billion in a realistic period of time.
So we have computers do it for us -- at least, in the latter example. No one person on Earth could mine a cave for raw materials and come back a few hours later with a computer mouse. Why don't we do the same for the former, then? Why don't we utilize complex algorithms -- or their precursors in the forms of independent, peer-reviewed standards organizations -- to determine how each one of us, as aggregates of desires and emotions, can live best? We may not be able to pull it off yet, but shouldn't it be in the works?
Our senses are notoriously unreliable. You may be dozens or even hundreds of meters off when assessing a large distance using only your eyes. People take inanimate objects in their periphery to be shadow beings, only to turn their heads and realize that they had been mistaken. An uttered sentence fragment may sound like something that isn't, contrary to the listener's protestations. Our opinions suck.
The prevailing hand shaping our opinions today is that subset of culture known as media -- an unfortunately anti-empirical, purely anecdotal device. Technology has allowed media to usurp religion, but who the hell would ever find gratification in replacing one despot with another? Conspiracy theories, "us versus them" notions, and the "evil mastermind" card aside, the answer is still, well, the despots.
Actually, it isn't. The more accurate answer, even if many a documentary maker doesn't want to hear it, is that all members of government, lobbies, or corporate entities, no matter how rich, no matter how powerful, no matter how comfortable, also have terrible opinions, and are equally victims of media. The military-industrial complex, Google, and anti-smoking lobbies are just as much a part of the meme agenda as the average guy on the street. This implies not that a small few are keeping the majority in line while benefiting from the latter's sheepishness, but that all humans currently alive are being "controlled" by poor values.
These values may be beneficial to the myopic system known as nature, who only "cares" about immediate results, but they are not only bad for the planet in the long run, they're bad for everyone alive. Were we to eliminate the monetary system, the psychotherapy paradigm, democracy, and the agenda of life itself, we would all be much happier.
It's one thing to be a rich CEO with a collection of private jets, but it's another altogether to be incapable of experiencing clinical depression, or systemically unlikely to experience fear of hackers, burglars, and scammers. What's more likely to be better for you? A bank account so full that only an absurdly minute portion will ever be used to purchase any kind of material goods, or a value system acknowledging the importance of both freedom from attachments and science as a tool for discovering social benefits, regardless of cost-effectiveness? The very pursuit of wealth is generally stressful, laden with paranoia, and high-risk. At the very least, there is fear of a revolt of "the masses," but ruthlessly fighting the competition, struggling to protect your interests, or ignoring the subtle pleasures of life are all a surefire way of inviting in very real -- and totally superfluous -- psychological duress.
Of course, it is still true that the rich benefit more from the presiding value system and its physical implements than everyone else, but the difference is insignificant relative to the difference between the middle class and upper class as a whole on the one hand, and what society would look like with independent peer review utilizing the scientific method to determine best practices for psychological wellness on the other. New medical practices; cures for aging; the permanent blocking of pain receptors; highly individuated, fully immersive, simulated fantasy worlds; abundance managed from the ground-up by computer algorithms "in charge" of a checkout system; dynamic, agile refinement in the place of complete system overhauls every few years -- none of these are profitable to any corporation on the planet!
Opting for something simpler may make you more money now, but what if you were to completely shut down your business, stop working altogether, research the open source and the innovative, then attend weekly seminars with other former corporate stockholders in a United Nations-like environment aimed at understanding the universe? The "scientific community" is there for this, but it has been relegated to a mere aid where it should be a guide. Besides, it currently relies on funding and donations, and is generally impeded by bureaucracy; if what you're looking into isn't going to benefit a powerful body, don't expect to get any money to fund your experiments.
In any case, our computers should be far more powerful now than they currently are; our search engines should be far more accurate than now, with their sloppy results, pointless hand-holding, and imposed inefficiencies; the average mind should be far more methodological, far more systematic than it currently is, but pandering to those who are stupid enough to click on Internet ads is more profitable than pandering to those who are most likely to make life awesome.
Why should YouTube be a video library with nothing but filmed college lectures, debates, and material inspiring us to live more efficiently, critically, and happily when it can be a place for pop music, makeup tutorials, and movie trailers? Who makes money when you learn something on the Internet? Who makes money from you figuring out how to better make your own money? Who makes money from you building something better than what everyone else makes money from? If we were not so enslaved by our own ideas and the lack of a real process for refining those ideas, we would all benefit, and the guys at the top would be much better off than they are today.
Monetary gain is still championed as the highest ideal by society because of this value disorder. Even though the notion that having more money is the equivalent of experiencing a better life is false for all of the above reasons, it's still causing our media to shape us into emotion-driven consumers. Anti-smoking lobbyists have succeeded in demonizing cigarettes, and although those are probably not the best things to consume, they have a far less negative net effect than alcohol. The Super Bowl shows us why we have been conditioned to think the opposite of the reality: because it's profitable.
Never mind that I have never met a social drinker who does not have at least one or two horror stories to tell about the time that they woke up somewhere unfamiliar, accidentally drove a car, slept with someone whom they shouldn't have, woke up feeling absolutely terrible the next day, or embarrassed themselves to the point of their coworkers perceiving them differently. Although these obviously stupid and unwanted consequences outweigh any minor social benefit of fitting into a crowd, young people drink far more now than they smoke, even in spite of smoking possessing almost zero potential to harm others.
Additionally, consuming several alcoholic drinks in a night on a weekly basis -- "drinking to get drunk" -- has been demonstrated by studies to drastically increase the likelihood of alcohol dependency later in life, and is pretty terrible for your health. Personally, I'd rather die of lung cancer at 70 than of cirrhosis at 50, or live a life replete with awful headaches and other physical withdrawal symptoms, domestic violence, and depression.
How can these memes flip in just a few decades? Changes in power structures. If you want to get ahead, the best way is to "push" people into a beneficial direction, and the best way to do that is to influence lobby groups into putting together unscientific smear campaigns. Chances are that if you believe in something strongly, it's because someone is making money from the physical effects of your belief, and has orchestrated an agenda to this end. Further, chances are also quite high that if you're living a life defined by shopping for clothes, listening to repetitive music, doing drugs, or following celebrities on Twitter, someone is profiting immensely from your lowest-common-denominator approach to the human experience; this "someone" may not have orchestrated such cultural degeneration, but upon realizing the potential for a trend to emerge, they certainly didn't bother to stop it.
School shootings, unfortunately, are no different. Gun control advocates play an important role in United States politics. The result? You can't go a half hour without running into pictures of President Obama wiping tears from his eyes as he describes a recent shooting as an "atrocity." Let's all continue to ignore the millions of years of elephants being eaten alive -- not because a quick shot to the head once in a while over the course of a few hundred years is objectively worse than being eaten alive once in a while over the course of a few million, but because we want gun control*!
Don't believe me? Find a CNN article on the most recent massacre and see how many comments you can make it through before some kind of gun-related policy discussion takes place. We need to wake up, but not because we're being controlled by an elite group. We need to wake up because we're allowing our own stupidity to shape us into predictable culture zombies, regardless of our social class.
* Gun control in some form is probably a good idea, because the majority of shootings in the first world are the result of accidents in a domestic environment, usually involving children. You are more likely to be paralyzed for life from a car accident than from a bullet wound to the spine. The problem isn't the guns, of course; it's the "gun culture," or more accurately, the paranoia culture, again, promulgated by the media (there are conflicting interests competing, remember?). In any case, take a look at any Crips neighborhood or read any anecdote from the Old West and tell me with a straight face that everyone possessing a gun is a good idea.
Encouragement of domestic insecurity also encourages avoidable suffering, whether in the form of unnecessary fear or actual bullet wounds. Just because four out of ten media items have to do with guns (I'm making this up for the sake of the point being illustrated) doesn't mean that four out of ten calamities in the real world involve guns. Do not allow culture to subjectively impress incidence statistics onto you anecdotally or vicariously.
Showing posts with label scientific method. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scientific method. Show all posts
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
On humility
In spite of our need to remain humbled by our limitations as finite cognitive processes, it is perfectly permissible for us to think that we have better ideas than other people. After all, if we're not all that confident in our present assessments of the environment, then we shouldn't be presenting said assessments to the public. It is not okay for everyone to "have an opinion" on every conceivable topic. For example, because of my ignorance regarding the reliability of one spaceship over another for the purpose of getting to Mars, I keep my mouth shut on the matter; to do otherwise is to promote information pollution (side note: this is why the idea of a representative democratic republic is a poor one).
Conversely, if someone is confident in his assessments of the environment -- due, in part, to peer review and repetition -- then we should not scorn him for this, or reference his alleged "superiority complex." Of course, we should not take him -- or his independent peers -- at his word, but dismissing someone merely because he thinks that his ideas appear to be more rational than yours is a fallacy. "What, do you think you're better than me because you believe this stuff?" is not a valid argument in any scenario, and least valid where the purveyor of the assessments has no vested interest in proving his superiority.
I will say that suffering contains value instead of that it's my personal opinion that suffering contains value not because I know for a fact that suffering contains value, but because prefacing every single statement with "Gee, I guess this is kind of possibly right, but it's just my opinion, so feel free to think whatever you want and not listen to me!" would be tremendously impractical and counterproductive. Basically, the impractical part lies in the politically correct tedium of it all, while the counterproductive part lies in the ensuing "You can think whatever you want" clause, with the latter promoting the meme that all ideas are equal.
No two ideas are equal where their qualities or quantities differ in any way whatsoever, and the only apparent reason for why anyone thinks otherwise is because they associate ideas with personal identity and individuality. If no one defined themselves by their ideals or ascribed any emotional significance to the fact that they held those ideals personally, then no one would cast random accusations of superiority complexes whenever someone else felt confident in an idea; in essence, no one would ever feel threatened by new information or in any way consider it a weapon to be wielded in some struggle for social dominance. It's like gift-giving: If everyone were to give gifts out of kindness instead of to display their philanthropy to a social circle, then no one would raise an eyebrow or accuse any gift-giver of ego-boosting.
There is a clear difference between knowing that you're right and seeing the data as pointing in your direction more than in the other directions. Decision-making is a matter of both quality and quantity, and most of the time, the involved quantities cannot be represented by a binary quandary. If my idea is a 7 and yours is a 6, who's to say that there isn't an 8 out there somewhere, awaiting discovery? Even if I'm less wrong than someone else, that doesn't mean that I'm right. Approximation is all that we can do with science -- for now.
Conversely, if someone is confident in his assessments of the environment -- due, in part, to peer review and repetition -- then we should not scorn him for this, or reference his alleged "superiority complex." Of course, we should not take him -- or his independent peers -- at his word, but dismissing someone merely because he thinks that his ideas appear to be more rational than yours is a fallacy. "What, do you think you're better than me because you believe this stuff?" is not a valid argument in any scenario, and least valid where the purveyor of the assessments has no vested interest in proving his superiority.
I will say that suffering contains value instead of that it's my personal opinion that suffering contains value not because I know for a fact that suffering contains value, but because prefacing every single statement with "Gee, I guess this is kind of possibly right, but it's just my opinion, so feel free to think whatever you want and not listen to me!" would be tremendously impractical and counterproductive. Basically, the impractical part lies in the politically correct tedium of it all, while the counterproductive part lies in the ensuing "You can think whatever you want" clause, with the latter promoting the meme that all ideas are equal.
No two ideas are equal where their qualities or quantities differ in any way whatsoever, and the only apparent reason for why anyone thinks otherwise is because they associate ideas with personal identity and individuality. If no one defined themselves by their ideals or ascribed any emotional significance to the fact that they held those ideals personally, then no one would cast random accusations of superiority complexes whenever someone else felt confident in an idea; in essence, no one would ever feel threatened by new information or in any way consider it a weapon to be wielded in some struggle for social dominance. It's like gift-giving: If everyone were to give gifts out of kindness instead of to display their philanthropy to a social circle, then no one would raise an eyebrow or accuse any gift-giver of ego-boosting.
There is a clear difference between knowing that you're right and seeing the data as pointing in your direction more than in the other directions. Decision-making is a matter of both quality and quantity, and most of the time, the involved quantities cannot be represented by a binary quandary. If my idea is a 7 and yours is a 6, who's to say that there isn't an 8 out there somewhere, awaiting discovery? Even if I'm less wrong than someone else, that doesn't mean that I'm right. Approximation is all that we can do with science -- for now.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
A proposition
The following already exist in our society:
- Abstraction techniques
- Meta-analysis (especially in the field of psychology)
- Peer review
- The scientific method
- Process management
- Systems analysis and development
- Meta-cognition
- Qualitative analysis
- Risk analysis
- Cost-benefit analysis; theories of opportunity cost
- Lists of logical pitfalls and fallacies to avoid during debates
- Set theory
- Information theory/systems theory
- Relational/regression analysis
- Iterative, cyclical, incremental, agile methods for improving systems
- Information transparency
The problem is that they do not exist concomitantly, and so are incoherent within the mess that is our bureaucratic, emotionally-driven society. The integration of these systems components, if you will, into a cohesive whole will be necessary for alleviating and terminating the negative consequences of sentient existence -- so let's get started! If you regularly perform any of the above processes or utilize any of the above tools and methods in a specific, concentrated area of your life, please start utilizing them in ALL areas, regardless of how contra it may be to your worldview and justifications for existing.
- Abstraction techniques
- Meta-analysis (especially in the field of psychology)
- Peer review
- The scientific method
- Process management
- Systems analysis and development
- Meta-cognition
- Qualitative analysis
- Risk analysis
- Cost-benefit analysis; theories of opportunity cost
- Lists of logical pitfalls and fallacies to avoid during debates
- Set theory
- Information theory/systems theory
- Relational/regression analysis
- Iterative, cyclical, incremental, agile methods for improving systems
- Information transparency
The problem is that they do not exist concomitantly, and so are incoherent within the mess that is our bureaucratic, emotionally-driven society. The integration of these systems components, if you will, into a cohesive whole will be necessary for alleviating and terminating the negative consequences of sentient existence -- so let's get started! If you regularly perform any of the above processes or utilize any of the above tools and methods in a specific, concentrated area of your life, please start utilizing them in ALL areas, regardless of how contra it may be to your worldview and justifications for existing.
Is it communism?
Preface: I am NOT a "member" of either the Venus Project or the Zeitgeist Movement. The below is an attempt to address accusations made by dissenters of those projects that they are inherently communist -- but with, perhaps, my own take on what a future society should look like. For the most part, this "rebuttal" does ally itself with the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project, but 4. and 5. in particular may differ slightly from those organizations' propositions, and I make no attempts to hide this fact.
1. Anarcho-communism and perfect communism are nothing like Stalinism, or any other implementation of state communism. The early Communist parties were afraid of revolt, so they adopted authoritarian practices. If our economic models are similar to perfect communism, that does not entail all of the negative consequences of what was essentially state socialism. Most of Europe is already socialist today, but no one has a knee-jerk reaction to its healthcare policies, for example, because those policies were implemented in a way that was completely dissimilar to that of the policies of the original Communist parties. In any case, while associating true communism with Marxist-Leninism or any other variant of state communism is itself erroneous, more importantly, each of the tried economic plans is contingent on the existence of scarcity, ownership, private property, etc. -- and, therefore, state mandates, hierarchy, top-down approaches, and lowest-common-denominator distribution of resources.
If the criticism is not that communism = state communism, then it is often that communism as an ideology has existed for over a hundred years and has never been effectively put into practice. This is basically a concession that it is a "good idea" (our economic models are not communist, though they are very similar), but that no one will listen. If this is the case, then the person making the assertion needs to stop attempting to convince those attempting to convince the world that it's not going to work, and start attempting to convince the world! Wouldn't that be so much more meaningful a use of his time?
Attempting to convince me to stop convincing others is not going to work itself, so you're being doubly inefficient by trying, and hypocritical to boot.
2. We have no interest in empowering the proletariat. In the future, humans will not just freely work alongside one another at will; they will also delegate monotonous tasks to machines. Marx had good ideas, but they were limited to his particular time period, and were thus naive and myopic -- in essence, resultant from the conditions and variables of the current system, and not from anything outside of it.
3. The economic system is just one of several internetworked systems which play a key role in the functioning of society as a super-system. Two "communists" may agree about the problems of means of production, private property, and social hierarchy, but that does not mean that both understand the various technical and social issues which currently plague our societies. Saying that our goals are "communism" is akin to saying that a computer system is an instant messaging application running on the system software.
So we and "communists" both enjoy using that same application; what does the application say about our respective practical solutions to foundational problems, or our goals and values? Further, what does it say about the entire, emergent system which we are developing? Reducing or relegating any set of ideas to a predefined category is an error of categorization borne from faulty qualitative analysis; an idea possessing a quality found in another idea that is part of a particular category does not mean that the former idea is also part of the category, and to think otherwise leads not only to errors in cognition, but to social enmity and conflict as well. Additionally, even where an idea is a member of a particular category, we cannot use non-defining qualities shared by members of that category to make assumptions about the idea.
4. We need a justification for human life before beginning work on the design of a new system. Communism does not provide this, because it is merely a vague economic model; it says nothing about scarcity, technology, infrastructure, the meaning of the universe, epistemology, meta-cognition, methodologies, process management, the scientific method, the nature of value, eliminating social biases, etc.
5. Communism is flat-out wrong in assuming that we can be "free" to access resources as they are made available, regardless of who we are. Rehabilitation, confinement, and conditioning centers will all be necessary in the future -- though, as abundance increases, and all fundamental human drives and desires come to be properly satiated with minimal time spent feeling deprived, there will eventually no longer be an impetus for most traditional, obvious forms of human conflict. After this, we would simply need to monitor conditioning centers carefully so as to allow memes and concepts to run properly and efficiently on their host minds, while controlling environmental stimuli to the greatest extent possible. This process will become easier as the human mind is augmented via nanotechnology and other cognitive enhancements.
Marx's communism was missing a necessary element that was not entirely developed in his time: the scientific method and its corresponding methodologies and principles. Rule by an ungoverned majority who simply wish to oppress dissenters in the name of their precious "free access to resources" or "control over the means of production" is NOT something that happens to peer reviewed communities in any form. So, yes, checks and balances will exist, as they do in democracy, but they will have some rational basis, and they will not come in the form of any one particular person or group of persons -- they will be contrary ideas. In other words, in our model, if a "senator" makes a decision that defies the views of someone who has written a letter to him -- and it is concluded that his decision is best, based on a number of variables and calculations performed by several parties -- that does not guarantee that the person who'd written the letter will not be "senator" for a day when his or her next idea is more agreeable and logical. Context will be stressed, and no one will have an absolute, indefinite role to play.
This may all sound like we're setting ourselves up for oppression, but do scientists "oppress" one another by prohibiting the publishing of poorly conducted studies, or by invalidating published ones with new or current research? Do architects "oppress" their peers by determining that they do not understand how to build bridges? Does Wikipedia "oppress" its users by disallowing the publishing of irrelevant or frivolous articles (well, they may be too lax)? Meta-analysis already exists in psychological circles, so why don't we implement it on a more fundamental level? True oppression only occurs in the face of scarcity; everything else is simply a matter of listening to the ideas that exist. What reason would anyone have to develop a bias, then consequently ignore new information, in a society like that proposed? How would he or she benefit from boosted social status and ego in a world without social hierarchy?
1. Anarcho-communism and perfect communism are nothing like Stalinism, or any other implementation of state communism. The early Communist parties were afraid of revolt, so they adopted authoritarian practices. If our economic models are similar to perfect communism, that does not entail all of the negative consequences of what was essentially state socialism. Most of Europe is already socialist today, but no one has a knee-jerk reaction to its healthcare policies, for example, because those policies were implemented in a way that was completely dissimilar to that of the policies of the original Communist parties. In any case, while associating true communism with Marxist-Leninism or any other variant of state communism is itself erroneous, more importantly, each of the tried economic plans is contingent on the existence of scarcity, ownership, private property, etc. -- and, therefore, state mandates, hierarchy, top-down approaches, and lowest-common-denominator distribution of resources.
If the criticism is not that communism = state communism, then it is often that communism as an ideology has existed for over a hundred years and has never been effectively put into practice. This is basically a concession that it is a "good idea" (our economic models are not communist, though they are very similar), but that no one will listen. If this is the case, then the person making the assertion needs to stop attempting to convince those attempting to convince the world that it's not going to work, and start attempting to convince the world! Wouldn't that be so much more meaningful a use of his time?
Attempting to convince me to stop convincing others is not going to work itself, so you're being doubly inefficient by trying, and hypocritical to boot.
2. We have no interest in empowering the proletariat. In the future, humans will not just freely work alongside one another at will; they will also delegate monotonous tasks to machines. Marx had good ideas, but they were limited to his particular time period, and were thus naive and myopic -- in essence, resultant from the conditions and variables of the current system, and not from anything outside of it.
3. The economic system is just one of several internetworked systems which play a key role in the functioning of society as a super-system. Two "communists" may agree about the problems of means of production, private property, and social hierarchy, but that does not mean that both understand the various technical and social issues which currently plague our societies. Saying that our goals are "communism" is akin to saying that a computer system is an instant messaging application running on the system software.
So we and "communists" both enjoy using that same application; what does the application say about our respective practical solutions to foundational problems, or our goals and values? Further, what does it say about the entire, emergent system which we are developing? Reducing or relegating any set of ideas to a predefined category is an error of categorization borne from faulty qualitative analysis; an idea possessing a quality found in another idea that is part of a particular category does not mean that the former idea is also part of the category, and to think otherwise leads not only to errors in cognition, but to social enmity and conflict as well. Additionally, even where an idea is a member of a particular category, we cannot use non-defining qualities shared by members of that category to make assumptions about the idea.
4. We need a justification for human life before beginning work on the design of a new system. Communism does not provide this, because it is merely a vague economic model; it says nothing about scarcity, technology, infrastructure, the meaning of the universe, epistemology, meta-cognition, methodologies, process management, the scientific method, the nature of value, eliminating social biases, etc.
5. Communism is flat-out wrong in assuming that we can be "free" to access resources as they are made available, regardless of who we are. Rehabilitation, confinement, and conditioning centers will all be necessary in the future -- though, as abundance increases, and all fundamental human drives and desires come to be properly satiated with minimal time spent feeling deprived, there will eventually no longer be an impetus for most traditional, obvious forms of human conflict. After this, we would simply need to monitor conditioning centers carefully so as to allow memes and concepts to run properly and efficiently on their host minds, while controlling environmental stimuli to the greatest extent possible. This process will become easier as the human mind is augmented via nanotechnology and other cognitive enhancements.
Marx's communism was missing a necessary element that was not entirely developed in his time: the scientific method and its corresponding methodologies and principles. Rule by an ungoverned majority who simply wish to oppress dissenters in the name of their precious "free access to resources" or "control over the means of production" is NOT something that happens to peer reviewed communities in any form. So, yes, checks and balances will exist, as they do in democracy, but they will have some rational basis, and they will not come in the form of any one particular person or group of persons -- they will be contrary ideas. In other words, in our model, if a "senator" makes a decision that defies the views of someone who has written a letter to him -- and it is concluded that his decision is best, based on a number of variables and calculations performed by several parties -- that does not guarantee that the person who'd written the letter will not be "senator" for a day when his or her next idea is more agreeable and logical. Context will be stressed, and no one will have an absolute, indefinite role to play.
This may all sound like we're setting ourselves up for oppression, but do scientists "oppress" one another by prohibiting the publishing of poorly conducted studies, or by invalidating published ones with new or current research? Do architects "oppress" their peers by determining that they do not understand how to build bridges? Does Wikipedia "oppress" its users by disallowing the publishing of irrelevant or frivolous articles (well, they may be too lax)? Meta-analysis already exists in psychological circles, so why don't we implement it on a more fundamental level? True oppression only occurs in the face of scarcity; everything else is simply a matter of listening to the ideas that exist. What reason would anyone have to develop a bias, then consequently ignore new information, in a society like that proposed? How would he or she benefit from boosted social status and ego in a world without social hierarchy?
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