IzyaKatzmann

Ah yeah, thanks for the response and discussion. Your final sentence, yeah, conjecture & hypothesizing w/o data can only get you so far. I was honestly on that rationalist train for a while and it still bleeds through with fantastical imaginary models. Need to touch grass every so often (i.e. deal with real world data).

I'm always super astonished though how some people, like Popper, Hayek, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx/Engels; managed to have such elaborate and interesting models and conceptions without the kind of like data available now. I put in Hayek and Popper, they really were off the mark on some spots I think (I'm trying to go through their work to see what libs/neocons like about it, whatever they self-report on what they like is really not helpful and a bit incomprehensible to me) and it really seems, as a consequence of their material conditions & environment, what these economists/thinkers thought actually did make sense from their POV. It really wracks my brain.

if you ever wanted to chat i would really like to hear more about your life, i think it's interesting and fascinating. i read some of your other comments; im really sorry to hear about your friend. i don't know what happened, i didn't want to be too nosey so if you already mentioned stuff about it i hope i didn't come off as insensitive.

i had a friend whose live i ruined. consistently, at least three times. she was like an angel, and the last thing i said to her, the first sentence was:

"i think you are self-centered and morally bankrupt"

i hope the thing with your friend wasn't too messy.

i think that would make it easier for me at least

dang you're so god damn cool. i'm not being sarcastic, i get that being unhoused is awful; the way you're describing stuff, you make it sound easy. maybe i'm way too soft or something, i always thought if i became unhoused i would lose my vanishingly small will to live and find a flatish and dark place to sleep into eternity

well, i'm not everyone then

It's such a shame :/ Imagine what the GDR could have been...

In science you use a null hypothesis to determine like, is the thing I'm proposing even worth doing? Is my hypothesis completely wrong?

To give an example because my plain-english attempts to explain stuff are usually cruddy: I see two doors, 🚪A and 🚪B. One door, 🚪A is of average width and height and the other, 🚪B is about 2/3rd's the height, same width.

People walk through the 🚪doors, I look and think I see a pattern. What I think is that people who are tall, will not go through 🚪B, why? Yeah maybe because tall people really really don't like it. Maybe they are entitled since they are generally viewed favourable in terms of dating on average at least. Maybe tall people just don't see the 🚪B, they only see things at a certain height.

Really I know it's physically possible, I just need to start somewhere, so I put people into two bins, tall and not-tall. I count 100 people walking through the 🚪doors and my null hypothesis, is something I can be confident in saying is not true. Like the opposite of what I want. My null hypothesis then is that no tall people go through 🚪B

Ok let's look at the data to see if we can reject my null hypothesis or not. Excuse the table formatting

             🚪A  🚪B
        Tall: 46   3
    Not-Tall: 37   14

Oh wow look at that! Ok now I can move on to my real question, which is, do people who are tall like to go through 🚪doors which are of lower height? This is much harder. Maybe I'll say if there is a preference of like 90%, so 90% of tall people go through regular height 🚪doors that means that they don't like going through shorter height 🚪doors. I also need to know how many people generally like to go through 🚪doors of shorter height. Because if tall people prefer regular 🚪doors as much as non-tall people, then height of the individual, tall or not, would not play a role in the difference.

Since I was able to eliminate the idea that tall people do not go through shorter 🚪doors, I can move on to other questions which depend on the initial null hypothesis to be false. Because, why waste time if our hunches or guesses (i.e our _hypotheses) are not on the right track?

Ok, does this relate. I'm skipping stuff for brevity, and I think you can still get it bcuz of scientific socialism & all that goodness. These 'failures' can tell us what not to do. And more importantly, these 'failures' failed in a specific way! Why that specific way? Because the overall 'failure' is the result of a ton of smaller 'failures' and 'successes' and we will say stuff that didn't really affect anything. Did the weather during a specific guerrilla attack lead to the end failure? Did a comrade in a mid-level position decrease the fighting power of the fighters? Are guerrilla tactics different in the 80s (I think it was the 80s?) and because tactics from the civil war in China were used, that was what ultimately led to failure?

The thing is there is likely some useful information. You're not wrong when you say it is a failure and thus not worth studying or that there is no point considering it. And others with different knowledge may find something useful. The trick is–you cannot know until you try. Because a presumption or prediction is a model, or something in your head. And as dialectical materialists we must accept that what is in our head is not the same as the external world, i.e. the stuff _outside of our head.

Again it's not that you are wrong; it's only, that is a difficult, perhaps impossible thing to know without actually putting in the work and effort.

One other way, think of these as experiments, not all experiments succeed, and why they fail helps you figure out how to run the experiment next time.

That last line about empathy hits hard comrade

How I like to imagine the people you refer to after reading your post and finishing the last line:

Yeah that makes sense. Would you say that rich/elite can be more susceptible due to their lack of like 'risk'? Which is just another way of describing material their wealth/resources?

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just a bit curious about your thoughts.

I'm thinking to calculate susceptibility in a superficial way, for like success of marketing of the kind you mentioned; you get a person's susceptibility by using their 1. temperament (individual/group/cultural differences), 2. their perceived material resources say abstracted with dollars, 3. their actual material resources again with dollars for convenience, 4. randomness/pseudo-randomness to account for uh whatever stuff we don't know (if economists and population geneticists and sociologists can use it I will too!!)

There'd be another set of variables/factors based on like how much money was poured into a marketing campaign, relevance maybe, etc.

What I wanted to ask you actually, was, do you think that given this back-of-the-napkin model, would 2. be like, more often than not, the determining factor? Like would the perceived or actual resource of in terms of fiat money (so like an abstraction which can be adjusted when needed...) be more 'significant'? Where significance is like a relative weighting of the two terms...

What really gets me is the "It's a banana, how much could it cost?" and like recently when the Brtsh PM tried to buy stuff from a grocery checkout; the level of disconnect is just so much more that I think I could have imagined. If you gave a prize to like how out of touch, they are, I'm sure I'd be completely off the mark. So I'm trying to bridge that gap in understanding

Yeah, what do you think?

I want to say it is nearly all the time. It's just, this might be an affective thing I have, at times I can't tell and it feels really confusing. Since what they are saying 1. doesn't appear to line up with my understanding of material reality, which is fine, and more importantly 2. the outcomes that are said to happen, like how maybe a person is 'struggling alone' and has 'difficulty being an ally'; aren't those the diagnostics or whatever like indicators that tell the person who is putting the spotlight on themselves to maybe try something else?

I try to talk to such a person, they always seem pretty genuine (exceptions ofc) and what they say really just confuses me more. If they were just lying it would be way easier to understand, and if they have 'drunk their own kool-aid' then I can never sort of manage to get any clarifying information...

What do you think? How would you tell what a person is using internally to continue their behaviour? Is it they get small 'wins' and that's enough to re-inforce the self-righteous behaviour? I was sorta like that before accepting what is out of my head (i.e. material world) is not the same as what is in my head.

Dang the stuff reactionaries think up that we fight for consistently prove to be way way better than how things actually are.

It's like they're describing a slice of paradise. Y'know those Ben Garrison drawings, that's what I had in mind.

Ok, that makes sense. Do you think it's possible to have an idea of what sort of arbitrary criterion would affect elite social peers for a given phenomena? Like to know specifically on a case-by-case basis. I don't think it'd be particularly useful, just curious.