Re: . 2.7 Million Morons

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Steve Harris  [EMAIL PROTECTED]) 
writes:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
>
>> >Yep. The size of "government" is a function of the economic capacity
>> >of a society. As long as there is energy available to support people
>> >who engage in telling other people what to do, there will be people
>> >who will fulfil that role.
>> 
>> Yep.
>
>
>Yep?? Yer not pullin yer weight in this with just a yep. We're trying
>to processes some social information here.
>
Well, yes, I'm sincerely sorry.  However, I'm also trying to process 
some experimental information right now and there is only so much one 
can do:-(

>Ed, I'm talking about something a tad more specific than just renaming
>every action you take in society as "information processing."  I'm
>after all the wasted mind-power that goes along with doing very
>specific social tasks, which is basically wheel-spinning. For example,
>consider the popularity of murder-mysteries. But why murder mysteries?
>Why not physics mysteries, or astronomy mysteries, or math mysteries?
>My mother reads murder mysteries like popcorn, and so do a lot of
>other folks. What gives?
>
>Well, if you see murder mystery as engaging the part of the brain that
>evolutionarily is required to do a certain amount social blame-fixing
>or justice-finding every day, like breathing, it all becomes
>understandable. Particularly as regards my mother [<g> Hi, mom]. As
>does a lot of what passes for entertainment today. We're all obviously
>starved for something, and it isn't only the opportunity to view
>violence. That's just men. Women, isolated in their less and less
>communal lives, are obviously starved for the opportunity to figure
>out and fix general social merit.
>
Hmm, an interesting observation.  Didn't think about it this way, but 
yes, it does add up.

>Ken would like a market for the product of such processing, rather as
>we had in the old days when everybody in the small town or tribe knew
>everybody else's buisiness. And your "reputation" was the equivalent
>coinage or currency output of the sum product off all this. You had a
>certain social reputation, and it was basically a separate social bank
>account, just like an economic one. But it definitely wasn't
>completely interchangable. People bought their way into society
>occasionally, and even bought elections, but there were some things
>money just couldn't buy. Patrick J. Kennedy was very pissed off about
>this over his life (Nevermind Harvard-- think of him in England, yuk,
>yuk). And I predict that his son JFK, had he lived, would have lived
>to learn a few lessons in the matter also. Things like this were
>catching up to him toward the end, and he only beat them in life by
>ducking into history early.
>
>The reason we lost all of that is partly that we're too mobile. Though
>we do have some semi-economic measures of reputation-- FICA scores--
>which follow us doggedly. Much of the rest of it is gone, however--
>victims of the automobile, which brought us suburbia. And of the One
>Eyed Monster in our living rooms, what Harlan Ellison called the glass
>teat. And as for the FBI, who used to keep track, we don't have Hoover
>anymore :(

You've mentioned TV in your previous post (one which I set aside, 
planning to respond to it later, but events intervened) so I'll just 
add here that I violently agree with you on this topic.  I had the 
rare opportunity to observe, first hand the effect of the introduction 
of TV in a country which went from "no TV" to "everybody has TV" 
within something like 2 years, so that the change which elsewhere was 
adiabatic, was abrupt there.  And the effect on social interaction was 
absolutely dismal. 

Coming back to the topic, though, I would say that the automobile and 
the suburbia were just some of the later nails in the coffin of the 
traditional (i.e. pre industrial revolution) social structure.  
Nowadays we discuss said structure in terms of "individual" versus 
"state" but the traditional pattern was "individual - extended_family 
- community".  All nearly fixed in time (except for the individuals, 
of course).  Anything above the community level was pretty abstract, 
for most people.  And it was within this traditional structure that 
the "social capital market" functioned very well.  
>
>How to get it back? Do we want it back? And if so, what part of it? I
>for one would like to see it applied to winnowing the gigantic prison
>population. There's a lot of judgement that has to go on, there, and
>not enough parole boards to do it. So how can we harness all this
>processing power for a what is a reall problem?

I've no idea.
>
>Mechanisms are hard. My problem is that I can't see any mechanistic
>formularization of "reputation" or "rehabilitation potential" or
>"trustworthiness" or "decency" which isn't as dollar-fungible as
>political votes. If it's tabulated by a machine, it can be bought,
>just as surely as you can launder your FICA if you want to spend the
>$. And anything designed to make up for our lack of direct social
>connectedness, MUST be tabulated over long distance by machine. That's
>the PROBLEM.
>
>Suggestions?

:-(((

Mati Meron                      | "When you argue with a fool,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]         |  chances are he is doing just the same"