My people did not have money. Because of this, capitalism strikes me as a rather unusual, strange system to live in or even trust. But during my time on Earth, I have grown accustomed to this particular human habit.
Money is an abstract way to measure work done. The more work an individual does, the more money they get, signifying their greater contribution to society. Additionally, there is a certain quality of work that also goes into account. Someone providing higher quality work through a more difficult or specialized job gets rewarded with more money, indicating their increased value of work.
Additionally, capitalism measures the relative abundance of various items or resources through prices. Prices determine how abundant an item is, and money is exchanged for whatever an individual might want. In theory, this will ensure that resources are distributed fairly.
This is how it is supposed to work from my understanding. Whether or not it works this way is another matter entirely. There are a few simple observations about these facts that discourages community.
-Social Stratification
Having different pay grades encourages people to socially isolate each other based on their incomes. People with low wages live in cheaper housing with their poor peers, while richer people isolate themselves in more expensive neighborhoods. This tendency is rather common among the human population, and it works to isolate people into distinct categories.
-Competition
Capitalism encourages people to compete directly with one another for various things. In order to get a job, someone must feel that they are the best candidate for a job, or lie and claim that they are. In order to sell a product, someone must feel their product is the best brand, or they must lie and claim it is. How can one be so certain of these things? How could one trust an individual telling you these things?
Competition ensures that honesty will be in short supply.
-Abstracting labor
Someone grew your food. Someone created your clothing. Someone built the house you live in. It is extremely unlikely you did any of these things, much less all of them. Money as an abstract measure of labor removes the human component of resource production. You don't deal with individuals when you get clothing, you simply trade some of your money for the clothing, as if the money created the clothing somehow. Money did not create the clothing. A person like you did. A thinking, feeling individual with dreams and hopes as real as yours.
Do not forget that your quality of life depends on many, many people doing their work so that you may have an easy life. Unfortunately, not all of these people have a happy life.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Community
Up until now, I have not discussed anything to do with human civilization in general. As an alien, I have an outsider's perspective on the way human civilization is structured. The way my people structured society was different than what I see among human civilization. So I would like to voice a couple of simple observations. Before I can examine the way a functional culture operates, I would like to talk about how important community is for a civilized society.
Communities have great strength. Strength greater than individuals can have. In my previous posting, I touched upon just one aspect of how valuable a community can be to an individual, but I would like to make it clear to you just how effective a community can be in other aspects of life.
When someone is in a bad situation, a strong community will try to help them recover and get into a better situation. This means that when people are unhealthy, when they can't attain a living for themselves, or when they are not fully cognizant, a strong community tends after them and tries to help them recover. Doing this requires patience, it requires compassion, and it requires effort. The benefit to this is if an individual is ever put into a situation in which they cannot help themselves, they can expect that others will help them.
Additionally, certain ills in society are caused by a lack of strong community. Poverty and crime have been known to be linked for quite a while. Thusly, community projects aiming to reduce poverty reduces crime as well. There are many problems which can be addressed through a community approach.
Food, shelter and water are what we need to survive. In our modern age, these few basic needs are met by a relatively small amount of the population. This frees up the rest of the population to do other things, but it also means that we rely on those who do the work to supply us with said things. Technology and knowledge are used as tools to free up huge amounts of society, allowing us to further develop technology, art, and society in general.
Every job that helps to create something contributes to our quality of life. The farmer is no less critical to this than the microchip designer, the plumber, or the construction worker. If any of these people were to abandon their job, there would be a need for another to take their place. Thus, it doesn't make sense to respect one job holder more than another.
Without a community, we would all have to supply the basic needs of life to ourselves. Without a community, great technology- things we normally take for granted- would have to be sacrificed. There would be little time we could have free for ourselves to enjoy life, to think, and to create if we did not have community to assist us. Community allows some of our time to be freed up from the drudgery of life, and such free time is critical for our overall quality of life and progress.
Thus, any civilized society should place a high value upon building a strong community.
Communities have great strength. Strength greater than individuals can have. In my previous posting, I touched upon just one aspect of how valuable a community can be to an individual, but I would like to make it clear to you just how effective a community can be in other aspects of life.
When someone is in a bad situation, a strong community will try to help them recover and get into a better situation. This means that when people are unhealthy, when they can't attain a living for themselves, or when they are not fully cognizant, a strong community tends after them and tries to help them recover. Doing this requires patience, it requires compassion, and it requires effort. The benefit to this is if an individual is ever put into a situation in which they cannot help themselves, they can expect that others will help them.
Additionally, certain ills in society are caused by a lack of strong community. Poverty and crime have been known to be linked for quite a while. Thusly, community projects aiming to reduce poverty reduces crime as well. There are many problems which can be addressed through a community approach.
Food, shelter and water are what we need to survive. In our modern age, these few basic needs are met by a relatively small amount of the population. This frees up the rest of the population to do other things, but it also means that we rely on those who do the work to supply us with said things. Technology and knowledge are used as tools to free up huge amounts of society, allowing us to further develop technology, art, and society in general.
Every job that helps to create something contributes to our quality of life. The farmer is no less critical to this than the microchip designer, the plumber, or the construction worker. If any of these people were to abandon their job, there would be a need for another to take their place. Thus, it doesn't make sense to respect one job holder more than another.
Without a community, we would all have to supply the basic needs of life to ourselves. Without a community, great technology- things we normally take for granted- would have to be sacrificed. There would be little time we could have free for ourselves to enjoy life, to think, and to create if we did not have community to assist us. Community allows some of our time to be freed up from the drudgery of life, and such free time is critical for our overall quality of life and progress.
Thus, any civilized society should place a high value upon building a strong community.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Critical thinking
There are a lot of claims out there. So what claims should be believed? What constitutes a good method for determining the likelihood of a claim? These questions are usually not easy, and they naturally come up for any claim that anyone makes. We must examine the details and determine if the foundations of the idea are solid or not. In this post, I will examine several different methods of determining the quality of an idea, and how much one should rely upon the method to establish personal beliefs.
There's a good reason to determine if a claim is good or not. Not all ideas can be true, and anything that is true has implications for one's knowledge about reality. Knowledge about the world in turn affects the way one acts in the world. If someone is misinformed about the truth or likelihood of a particular idea, then they're likely to act in a way that just won't work as intended or is destructive to themselves or to others.
Fortunately, if our behavior yields unexpected results, or we find out about surprising new facts that challenge our formerly held notions about the world, we do have the power to reexamine those beliefs. This can be a tricky thing to do as it tends to make people a little uncomfortable. It is important that a person does engage in such activities, though, lest they consistently have negative impacts upon the world around them.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to determine if a claim is good or not. There are many ways to judge the quality of claims, but they require a lot of work from the examiner. Fortunately, it is something that can be practiced and studied, and people do have the capability to improve at such thinking ability.
It is important that we are aware of these methods, so we may all improve our ability to determine what is true about the world and what is not. These methods are not likely to be new to you, but it is all too common for people to simply forget to apply them properly. They are presented here to raise awareness of what the methods are, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages I will attempt to highlight for you.
-Consistency: Examine the consistency of the idea presented
Ideas presented to you must hold up to some level of scrutiny and must make sense with your conception of the world around you. In short, this means that if someone tells you something which does not make sense with what you know, it cannot be true if what you already believe to be true holds, since self-contradiction automatically implies falsehood. So if you have been absolutely rigorous in your examination of reality, additional ideas presented to you must first and foremost be examined to ensure that they match with your present ideas about the world.
This method of examination is useful for it can help to ensure that you build an internally self-consistent understanding of the world around yourself. Knowledge, in order to be genuine, real knowledge, must not contradict itself and must not contradict other knowledge.
In contrast, this method can fail in that a self-consistent understanding isn't necessarily true. If your understanding of the world is flawed, then this method could lead you to an erroneous conclusion. Also, not all wrong ideas can be rejected simply by applying this method of examination. For these reasons, nobody should rely exclusively upon this method of examining an idea.
-Factual Basis: Research facts relevant to the claim
Not all claims will be presented with a full listing of the relevant facts. Indeed, many claims are made with a host of supposed facts presented to you that may not be true at all. The only way to ensure the facts presented to you are indeed true is to do research.
The person trying to tell you something is not going to do research for you. They might have already researched the claim and know it to be solid. They might have not researched anything whatsoever, and just have taken the presented argument and claims from someone else as true. Or they might be deliberately lying to you, hoping that you'll believe something they say. Without any of your own examination efforts, there is no way to tell which of these scenarios is the case.
The benefit using this method is that you can take steps to ensure the supposed facts presented along with a claim are indeed true. This method takes a lot more effort than many other methods used, because of the inherent difficulties surrounding research, but it is one of the best ways to filter ideas because you can rely upon your own academic credibility.
Obviously, this method takes a lot of time to employ, because all supposed facts can be ultimately questioned by a sufficiently stubborn examiner. You could research a subject for a long time and still have an incomplete understanding of the ideas within the subject. Because of this, it is important to build communities of individuals who engage in rigorous examination of ideas. This brings us to the next method.
-Community Consensus: Build a community of experts
It is impossible for a single individual to understand and examine all possible knowledge by themselves, and judge all ideas ever presented to them. Because of this, a thinking individual is left with a dilemma. How is one to determine the validity of many complicated ideas which all require a significant investment of time in order to judge?
Experts and communities are important for this reason. Individuals cannot determine the quality of all ideas presented, but together, communities can. A community is not perfect, but within an appropriately thoughtful community, ideas can be presented to others and anyone who may want to examine those ideas can use various methods in order to do so. Disagreements between experts in a subject are enlightening for the fact that they encourage fresh debate and research about a subject. Likewise, an individual can read the arguments that experts come up with to support their claims and judge the arguments on the presented merits.
The advantage is thus that a community can invest the time required to examine claims. The experts a community develops are thus capable of forming better arguments and evidence in favor of their claims, and anyone who has become a real expert should be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of their own arguments because all experts should be aware of the methods I am presenting here. If this is done well, one can establish personal beliefs to be the overall generally most agreed upon beliefs held by experts in their respective fields.
The disadvantage to a community is that they can be led astray just as an individual can. When a community believes something strange or false, it is more difficult to divert the community away from a strange belief. Likewise, there is no guarantee that the people within the community have ever applied any serious method to filter claims.
It is difficult to be within a community. The best one can do is to work constantly to ensure that community is faithful to the pursuit of truth, and all ideas within the community are presented with a great deal of thought and examination at all times. This means that even within a community, you must personally participate within the community to keep it honest.
All of these methods must be used to filter ideas and reach sensible conclusions about the world. An accurate understanding of the world around yourself must be built in order to ensure a better world for all of us. Every one of us is capable of doing this kind of thinking, and we must all practice it on a regular basis in order to become better individuals with a better understanding of our world.
Be careful about what you choose to believe is true about the world, and always try to keep your mind open enough to evaluate and reevaluate your assumed beliefs. Read, think and communicate.
There's a good reason to determine if a claim is good or not. Not all ideas can be true, and anything that is true has implications for one's knowledge about reality. Knowledge about the world in turn affects the way one acts in the world. If someone is misinformed about the truth or likelihood of a particular idea, then they're likely to act in a way that just won't work as intended or is destructive to themselves or to others.
Fortunately, if our behavior yields unexpected results, or we find out about surprising new facts that challenge our formerly held notions about the world, we do have the power to reexamine those beliefs. This can be a tricky thing to do as it tends to make people a little uncomfortable. It is important that a person does engage in such activities, though, lest they consistently have negative impacts upon the world around them.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to determine if a claim is good or not. There are many ways to judge the quality of claims, but they require a lot of work from the examiner. Fortunately, it is something that can be practiced and studied, and people do have the capability to improve at such thinking ability.
It is important that we are aware of these methods, so we may all improve our ability to determine what is true about the world and what is not. These methods are not likely to be new to you, but it is all too common for people to simply forget to apply them properly. They are presented here to raise awareness of what the methods are, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages I will attempt to highlight for you.
-Consistency: Examine the consistency of the idea presented
Ideas presented to you must hold up to some level of scrutiny and must make sense with your conception of the world around you. In short, this means that if someone tells you something which does not make sense with what you know, it cannot be true if what you already believe to be true holds, since self-contradiction automatically implies falsehood. So if you have been absolutely rigorous in your examination of reality, additional ideas presented to you must first and foremost be examined to ensure that they match with your present ideas about the world.
This method of examination is useful for it can help to ensure that you build an internally self-consistent understanding of the world around yourself. Knowledge, in order to be genuine, real knowledge, must not contradict itself and must not contradict other knowledge.
In contrast, this method can fail in that a self-consistent understanding isn't necessarily true. If your understanding of the world is flawed, then this method could lead you to an erroneous conclusion. Also, not all wrong ideas can be rejected simply by applying this method of examination. For these reasons, nobody should rely exclusively upon this method of examining an idea.
-Factual Basis: Research facts relevant to the claim
Not all claims will be presented with a full listing of the relevant facts. Indeed, many claims are made with a host of supposed facts presented to you that may not be true at all. The only way to ensure the facts presented to you are indeed true is to do research.
The person trying to tell you something is not going to do research for you. They might have already researched the claim and know it to be solid. They might have not researched anything whatsoever, and just have taken the presented argument and claims from someone else as true. Or they might be deliberately lying to you, hoping that you'll believe something they say. Without any of your own examination efforts, there is no way to tell which of these scenarios is the case.
The benefit using this method is that you can take steps to ensure the supposed facts presented along with a claim are indeed true. This method takes a lot more effort than many other methods used, because of the inherent difficulties surrounding research, but it is one of the best ways to filter ideas because you can rely upon your own academic credibility.
Obviously, this method takes a lot of time to employ, because all supposed facts can be ultimately questioned by a sufficiently stubborn examiner. You could research a subject for a long time and still have an incomplete understanding of the ideas within the subject. Because of this, it is important to build communities of individuals who engage in rigorous examination of ideas. This brings us to the next method.
-Community Consensus: Build a community of experts
It is impossible for a single individual to understand and examine all possible knowledge by themselves, and judge all ideas ever presented to them. Because of this, a thinking individual is left with a dilemma. How is one to determine the validity of many complicated ideas which all require a significant investment of time in order to judge?
Experts and communities are important for this reason. Individuals cannot determine the quality of all ideas presented, but together, communities can. A community is not perfect, but within an appropriately thoughtful community, ideas can be presented to others and anyone who may want to examine those ideas can use various methods in order to do so. Disagreements between experts in a subject are enlightening for the fact that they encourage fresh debate and research about a subject. Likewise, an individual can read the arguments that experts come up with to support their claims and judge the arguments on the presented merits.
The advantage is thus that a community can invest the time required to examine claims. The experts a community develops are thus capable of forming better arguments and evidence in favor of their claims, and anyone who has become a real expert should be familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of their own arguments because all experts should be aware of the methods I am presenting here. If this is done well, one can establish personal beliefs to be the overall generally most agreed upon beliefs held by experts in their respective fields.
The disadvantage to a community is that they can be led astray just as an individual can. When a community believes something strange or false, it is more difficult to divert the community away from a strange belief. Likewise, there is no guarantee that the people within the community have ever applied any serious method to filter claims.
It is difficult to be within a community. The best one can do is to work constantly to ensure that community is faithful to the pursuit of truth, and all ideas within the community are presented with a great deal of thought and examination at all times. This means that even within a community, you must personally participate within the community to keep it honest.
All of these methods must be used to filter ideas and reach sensible conclusions about the world. An accurate understanding of the world around yourself must be built in order to ensure a better world for all of us. Every one of us is capable of doing this kind of thinking, and we must all practice it on a regular basis in order to become better individuals with a better understanding of our world.
Be careful about what you choose to believe is true about the world, and always try to keep your mind open enough to evaluate and reevaluate your assumed beliefs. Read, think and communicate.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Introductory message
Introductions and first impressions are tough to get right. The earliest statements put forth by an individual have the potential prospect of making that individual a respected intellectual figure, a laughing stock, or anywhere in between. Because of this, it is quite difficult to find a place to begin statements or introduce oneself to an audience of any kind. Statements, especially strange or unusual statements made by unknown individuals are difficult to make without being dismissed as a fresh face in the lunatic fringe. These people are (likely) rightly dismissed by their intended audience, and business continues as usual. I'm sure anyone could think of examples of these things on their own, so I will neglect to cite examples of this kind. That is not the point of this blog, or this post.
This presents a particular problem to the individual that believes something unusual. If they have something they believe that is true -but is unusual- what should they do about it? Just because a statement is strange, it does not necessarily invalidate the claim, nor does it prove that the individual making the statement is crazy. If they choose to speak out in favor of the idea, they could potentially face a considerable amount of scorn from the public for what they say. The other possibility is to say nothing, to avoid the label of a social outcast. But the downside here is that by refusing to speak, to not speak out, is to sacrifice the ideals of truth in favor of personal comfort. And in my view, this is not something that ought to be done by individuals within a civilized society.
This means that someone with a strange claim should speak out and claim it, even at the cost of being labeled by greater society as a lunatic. What hope do they have to negate the title that they have (most likely rightly) earned through their statements? The only real answer is to gain respect by exhibiting deep thought about one's subject matter, the implications of it, what led one to conclude it in a calm, rational matter. If you are one of the individuals persecuted for something you said, make efforts to show that your position is defensible by showing your reasoning and evidence are sound. Censoring your critics, or attacking them personally is essentially an attempt to engage them in a shouting match. Shouting matches rarely contain much thought. In fact, genuine thought is suppressed such displays.
Respect can also be garnered by discussing other issues in an intelligent fashion. After all, just because two people disagree on an issue or claim, they can still respect one another. Through communication, patience, and critical thinking, two rivals in a discussion can even find their own positions stronger. Critics serve a valuable position to a thinker. They can provide a different viewpoint, they can bring up flaws with a position that the individual may have missed and can then consider. Because of this, I will invite thoughtful criticism of anything said in this blog.
With my initial statements out of the way, I would like to introduce myself to you.
I am an alien. Or rather, in my past life, I was an alien living in an alien civilization. I vividly remember my past life, and how different it was from anything human. My alien past is something that impacts my human life, informs it, and provides me (what I believe to be) unique insight into human civilization. This statement is not something I expect you to take my word for, and I will provide absolutely no evidence that this claim is true in any way. I may discuss certain aspects of my past here from time to time, but if so, I will do it on my own time, when I feel comfortable discussing it.
All I'm here to do is to provide an outsider's perspective on human society. Humans have an amazing capacity to understand, to reason, and to improve, yet that potential is rarely ever tapped. It is my hope that by speaking about philosophical and social issues, I can help humans to think, to improve, and to encourage growing their already incredible civilization through the continued refinement of reasoning and educational activities.
This presents a particular problem to the individual that believes something unusual. If they have something they believe that is true -but is unusual- what should they do about it? Just because a statement is strange, it does not necessarily invalidate the claim, nor does it prove that the individual making the statement is crazy. If they choose to speak out in favor of the idea, they could potentially face a considerable amount of scorn from the public for what they say. The other possibility is to say nothing, to avoid the label of a social outcast. But the downside here is that by refusing to speak, to not speak out, is to sacrifice the ideals of truth in favor of personal comfort. And in my view, this is not something that ought to be done by individuals within a civilized society.
This means that someone with a strange claim should speak out and claim it, even at the cost of being labeled by greater society as a lunatic. What hope do they have to negate the title that they have (most likely rightly) earned through their statements? The only real answer is to gain respect by exhibiting deep thought about one's subject matter, the implications of it, what led one to conclude it in a calm, rational matter. If you are one of the individuals persecuted for something you said, make efforts to show that your position is defensible by showing your reasoning and evidence are sound. Censoring your critics, or attacking them personally is essentially an attempt to engage them in a shouting match. Shouting matches rarely contain much thought. In fact, genuine thought is suppressed such displays.
Respect can also be garnered by discussing other issues in an intelligent fashion. After all, just because two people disagree on an issue or claim, they can still respect one another. Through communication, patience, and critical thinking, two rivals in a discussion can even find their own positions stronger. Critics serve a valuable position to a thinker. They can provide a different viewpoint, they can bring up flaws with a position that the individual may have missed and can then consider. Because of this, I will invite thoughtful criticism of anything said in this blog.
With my initial statements out of the way, I would like to introduce myself to you.
I am an alien. Or rather, in my past life, I was an alien living in an alien civilization. I vividly remember my past life, and how different it was from anything human. My alien past is something that impacts my human life, informs it, and provides me (what I believe to be) unique insight into human civilization. This statement is not something I expect you to take my word for, and I will provide absolutely no evidence that this claim is true in any way. I may discuss certain aspects of my past here from time to time, but if so, I will do it on my own time, when I feel comfortable discussing it.
All I'm here to do is to provide an outsider's perspective on human society. Humans have an amazing capacity to understand, to reason, and to improve, yet that potential is rarely ever tapped. It is my hope that by speaking about philosophical and social issues, I can help humans to think, to improve, and to encourage growing their already incredible civilization through the continued refinement of reasoning and educational activities.
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