A surprisingly well thought out article for once. Was worth the read.
Or to pull out another example: what level of overstep is necessary for it to become acceptable (praiseworthy?) to throw your shoes at George W. Bush?
The paper you cite is entirely unempirical. It’s using the same methods you criticize in the article.
Fair enough, in a formal manner it’s empirical.
As a work, it’s political philosophy. Not science. Which makes it odd as a counterpoint to arguing the article in question is too aloof.
(Also, conflating irrational and illogical is unfounded. Nature is irrational. Per Caplan, individual agents may find it advantageous to act illogically. It doesn’t follow that one can’t use logic or rational thought to characterize the system.)
By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical, which means politics has no basis in logic-derived axioms as propagated by Alexander.
Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument. Your replies are extremely irrelevant.
What would you call someone who waxes philosophy on politics?
> By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical
Lovely, so logic—by your construction—is useless given nature itself, lacking the ability to understand, is not rational.
(You’re mixing up sub-definitions of rationality. None of this is relevant, however, to the broader topic.)
> Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument
Was this written by AI?
Robust counterargument.
To conclude the thread, yes, you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish, through to things which can't reason at all, whether they be oceans or planets. Moreover, one can logically characterise that which behaves illogically in the same way we can mathematically characterise and constrain the behaviour of fractals and fluids and other objects which are, fundamentally, impossible to precisely describe.
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
Of fractals and fluids? I think you misunderstood what they wrote.
Stating that it's a model is not the same thing as stating that it is useless. Nor that the relationships are wholly wrong. You said it yourself.
> all models are wrong yet some are helpful
Sure, nothing is knowable. Great if you’re trying to get social sciences funding. Not super useful for anything practical.
The math of orbital mechanics has no relation to the behaviour of objects in orbit?
Stick to politics, that's the thread, engineer.
Lol what? You just posted a cog-sci op ed whose first third rambles on being refused publication decades prior. (The second two thirds pretends behavioural neutoanatomy, where we stimulate brain structures to see what happens, doesn’t exist.)
It is, but only for those who know neither logic nor politics.
> So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors
So don't create them.
> arbitrary metaphors [are] what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label.
That's true for the R/D circus but it's not true for politics in general, it's not a law of nature, it's just a fact of present day politics.
More importantly, framing that fact as something inevitable renders the framer incapable of recognizing its utmost importance as a piece of evidence that can help a diligent investigator uncover the political truths hidden behind it.
The framer has no valid framework. There are no such things as empirically valid statements in political science, as the field is composed of subjective narratives. There are no such things as political truths.
Oh, yes it is, there's history to learn from, just because you're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> The framer has no valid framework.
If you understood the comment you replied to, you'd realize that "the framer" there refers to you, so your statement above means "mallowdram has no valid framework". Ironically, it's true - you lack a valid framework because you lack knowledge of logic, history and politics.
If you had an understanding of what history is, you'd understand it has no scientific validity.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537995/how-history-gets-thin...
As there is no scientific basis for history, and there is no logic to politics (it is irrational), nothing stated by Alexander is valid.