Hi Ali,
(By the way, I visited the Reseed.CA web
site and liked the approach of urban gardens. My neighbor has planted
various veggies in numerous yards in the neighborhood, which is his interest,
and so my family has a garden plot which we allowed him to plant and
nurture. He gives us some of the (delicious fresh) veggies in return, and
he keeps most of the produce for his own family or others. I think that
idea is a good one so long as nobody tries to force anyone else, through
politics, law, regulation, or peer pressure, to hew the party line. If it
is all voluntary, I like it. If it uses pressure of any kind, or takes
money from a government, I don’t like it.)
Re homeopathic medicines, I have no
tendency either way. It seems to me that the homeopathic way doesn’t
have a strong scientific foundation, and what little I know of the experiments
that have been done, it hasn’t worked. But if a homeopath wants to
believe in, apply, and steer his life by homeopathic wisdom, I have not problem
with that. It just isn’t my way of life. I am more inclined
to trust doctors, or at least some of them who have shown a history of
successfully treating illnesses in my family.
You wrote:
Similarly people who claim that taxes are so high so
that businesses won't employ individuals, or to state the tax burden of a
demographic without the context of the other types of tax, nor mentioning the
share of wealth for the demographic - it is misinformation and disingenuous
It isn’t a context free conjecture;
I have experience in running about five businesses over the years, and in
hiring people who want to earn money, but are pinched by the taxation.
The taxes on payrolls here in California are
atrocious, and are causing businesses (such as Amazon) to leave the state and
move to other states, notably Texas.
If you watch Fox Business News, you will see company executives one after
another agreeing that the basic federal-only tax rate (35% for corporations and
about the same for individuals). But I suspect you won’t consider
Fox Business News a source of truth; that is your choice to make as well.
But you owe it to yourself to hear other sources of information that don’t
agree with your own past history. It’s the best way to grow.
Payroll taxes amount to about another 30%
of each employee’s base pay. So if you hire someone making 50K, it
costs 65K BEFORE you pay the cost of benefits, also paid by companies to cover employees’
needs.
Then add California’s 7.5% sales tax, and then a
1.5% effective tax on the full value of real estate (advanced every year by the
counties on a theoretical consideration of inflation even with the current
collapse of the real estate market). Then add special levies, fees,
licensing costs and regulatory board constraints, and you have a state that is
quickly becoming poor as businesses move out.
Here in Costa Mesa, a relatively small city of less
than 100K people or so, the Chief of Police and his Assistant Chief of Police
was making $300K per year – union benefits not included, and also very
expensive. The day a new peace officer hired on, they were immediately
paid $97K starting salary, not including payroll taxes and benefits. The
current board of supervisors ran on a pledge to privatize the expensive union
services, and gave the unions six months to find new jobs, or to form private
enterprises and competitively bid for the work. The union starting
running TV ads with its members’ money. So I know what the business
climate and the tax climate is like, and it isn’t good. The average
life guard
in Newport Beach,
our neighbor city, makes nearly two hundred thousand before payroll taxes and
benefits. This is the reality of this area, due to politicians pleasing
union members through their management. This is the very model of
unsustainability.
A further deviation from Maslow's original
hierarchy is that needs such as shelter, hunger etc., are present throughout
life. It's not as if one satisfies them once and they're done with, but rather
they are constantly in a state of flux. If I have not eaten for a couple
of days, even though I am generally well, in most circumstances motivations
regarding satisfying my hunger will come to dominate my behaviour and any
conceptualization of self-interest - absent serious dedication and focus on my
part (i.e. hunger strike etc.). Of course, this is a broad generalization, but
it illustrates a basic observation, the hierarchy isn't neatly delineated, but
rather at a constant state of interplay with the present circumstances of the individual,
dependent on their particular life histories.
I can agree with that. Life is not a
stable system, if it ever was in human history. So why should we expect
our needs to be constant.
An implication is that self-actualization might also
need to be understood in terms of mating and status. They also recognize limits
in such generalizations - in that these archetypes are realized in unique ways
by individuals and need not always apply to everyone. This is due to the
fact that they are making the claims about evolutionary groups (i.e. human
species as a whole) and not about individuals (or particular life histories).
The table on page 305 summarizes a lot of the ecological stimuli / cues which
affect which aspect of the hierarchy might be dominant, hence mitigating any
purely conceptual / ideological / abstract rendering of self-interest.
Any abstraction such as that one is
necessarily incomplete, and very likely doesn’t apply in many, many cases.
It may not even apply to the majority of cases. It would be nice to see
some real measured data over a long period of time before generalizing on
concepts.
I think self-interest is defined more in terms
of motivation, as they conclude:
A consideration of the ultimate functions of
behaviors and of life-history development counsels the explicit
inclusion of motivational levels linked to mating and reproduction.
Reproduction for humans is not ultimately about selfgratification,
but involves a considerable diversion of resources
away from selfish goals and toward other human beings in our
social networks. A consideration of life-history trade-offs also
implies that later developing motive systems never fully
replace earlier ones and that they continue to coexist, ready
to be activated depending on current opportunities and threats
in the environment, in interaction with individual differences.
Thus, a key point of this revised perspective is the focus on the
ongoing dynamic interaction between internal motives and
their functional links to ongoing environmental threats and
opportunities. (Kenrick et al, page 309)
I can believe that as well. Can you
relate that to the self interest ontology in some way? It sounds like it
might provide useful insights.
Thanks for sharing your viewpoint,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ali Hashemi
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 5:48
PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Self
Interest Ontology going offline
Hi Rich
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
[RC] You could be right about this; I haven’t exactly gotten
the list to see eye-to-eye, and I do agree that what I have posted are
definitely my own opinions, as other posts to “correct” them have
been the opinions of the “correcting” posters. But
“unfounded”? I disagree on that adjective, and believe that
my opinion is well shared by economists who have NOT bought into the Keynesian
theories, or who have realized that Keynes was only a theoretician without
grounding.
Economists who have no background in actually practicing the
theories, of course, disagree with the others. Paul Krugman, for example,
continues to preach Keynesian doctrine, while Art Laffer, a far better analyst
IMHO, seems convinced by the Hayek viewpoint, and by the experienced view of
other more practitioners who aren’t as enamored of theory as to lose
sight of actual data.
Apologies for the insensitive language. I was thinking of the claims
regarding climate change and disproportionate tax burdens when I was writing
this. While I appreciate subjectivity and the fact that there are multiple ways
of looking at many things, that's not the same as admitting that all
perspectives are equally valid and deserve the same attention. I've spent too
much of my time trying to engage proponents of homeopathic medicines, new age
believers, climate change deniers and just plain misinformation re tax burdens
to respond tactfully.
While something like the efficacy of homoeopathic
medicines can't entirely be disproven, the evidence is scant to support it
and the perspective is not just one of subjective interpretations, patients
might forego useful procedures and indeed, engage in harmful practices out of
misinformation. Similarly, while anthropogenic climate change can't be
completely proven, a lot of evidence supports it, and to divert attention to
those who claim it is a fantasy that we do not need to address is trying. To
pretend that subjective or relative interpretations somehow make all perspective
equally sound is disingenuous. Hence the bursque language. Similarly people who
claim that taxes are so high so that businesses won't employ individuals, or to
state the tax burden of a demographic without the context of the other types of
tax, nor mentioning the share of wealth for the demographic - it is
misinformation and disingenuous... Anyway, I hope we can move on.
[RC] Yes, and I think you have a point. My attempt to relate
these issues to the self interest ontology hasn’t succeeded, and may only
have opened up more nonessential, nonproductive discussions. Would you
like to contribute a post that you see as more directed to the issue, perhaps
using Maslow’s ideas as a basis?
Sure, in the revised hierarchy (see page 293), they note the effect
that a life history (page
299) has on the stages which affect a person's needs and motivations. With
broad strokes here, at a primary level, before one can satisfy "higher
order/level" motivations and be able to attend to self-interest in a more
abstract / conceptual / thought-out manner, one needs to satisfy basic
physiological constraints.
Someone deprived of food, nourishment, physical health etc., will have
a very difficult time conceiving let alone practising more conceptual
types of desires. Notions of self-interest that can be employed by a particular
organism are dependent on satisfying a various ecological realities including
physiological needs. It seems that some baseline of socializing or engagement
is arguably a physiological need for many humans (see page 296).
A further deviation from Maslow's original hierarchy is that needs
such as shelter, hunger etc., are present throughout life. It's not as if one
satisfies them once and they're done with, but rather they are constantly in a
state of flux. If I have not eaten for a couple of days, even though I am
generally well, in most circumstances motivations regarding satisfying my
hunger will come to dominate my behaviour and any conceptualization of
self-interest - absent serious dedication and focus on my part (i.e. hunger
strike etc.). Of course, this is a broad generalization, but it illustrates a
basic observation, the hierarchy isn't neatly delineated, but rather at a
constant state of interplay with the present circumstances of the individual,
dependent on their particular life histories.
One of the fundamental claims in the paper is [1]:
At the broadest level, an evolutionary approach implies that
all behavior is goal-oriented, resulting from psychological
adaptations that were designed by natural selection to deal with
recurrent threats and opportunities. A considerable body of
comparative and neuropsychological evidence now supports
the assumption of multiple motivational and cognitive systems (Kenrick et al
page 295)
An implication is that self-actualization might also need to be
understood in terms of mating and status. They also recognize limits in such
generalizations - in that these archetypes are realized in unique ways by
individuals and need not always apply to everyone. This is due to the
fact that they are making the claims about evolutionary groups (i.e. human
species as a whole) and not about individuals (or particular life histories).
The table on page 305 summarizes a lot of the ecological stimuli / cues which
affect which aspect of the hierarchy might be dominant, hence mitigating any
purely conceptual / ideological / abstract rendering of self-interest.
As a minimum, we have noted that each motivational system is
connected to a set of different threats and opportunities.
Moreover, the behaviors, feelings, and decision rules involved
in making one’s mate happy are different than those involved in
defending against infidelity and those involved in making
friends are different from those involved in catching cheaters
on social contracts. Thus, it is perhaps more appropriate to think
of motivational systems as somewhat akin to Martindale’s
(1980) notion of ‘‘subselves’’—as sets of
subprograms for dealing
with general categories of adaptive problems, linked in
associative networks (Kenrick, 2006; Kenrick & Shiota, 2008;
Kurzban & Aktipis, 2007). For example, seeing an attractive
member of the opposite sex can prime a network of thoughts and
feelings involving one’s own partner and one’s own mate value,
activate strategies designed to increase or decrease commitment
to the relationship, and so on (e.g., Gutierres et al., 1999; Maner,
Rouby, & Gonzaga, 2008; Roney, 2003)...
Socially shared
experiences that result from one’s particular culture will also
be important (e.g., Japanese and Americans respond differently
to opportunities to interact with someone at a different level of
the social hierarchy; Nakao, 1987). As discussed earlier, it is
becoming increasingly clear that those cultural experiences are
not necessarily arbitrary from a biological perspective and that
they are often linked to ecological factors. (Kenrick et al page 307)
I think self-interest is defined more in terms of motivation, as
they conclude:
A consideration of the ultimate functions of
behaviors and of life-history development counsels the explicit
inclusion of motivational levels linked to mating and reproduction.
Reproduction for humans is not ultimately about selfgratification,
but involves a considerable diversion of resources
away from selfish goals and toward other human beings in our
social networks. A consideration of life-history trade-offs also
implies that later developing motive systems never fully
replace earlier ones and that they continue to coexist, ready
to be activated depending on current opportunities and threats
in the environment, in interaction with individual differences.
Thus, a key point of this revised perspective is the focus on the
ongoing dynamic interaction between internal motives and
their functional links to ongoing environmental threats and
opportunities. (Kenrick et al, page 309)
In this light, I might consider how the different motivations define
different types of self-interest and what the semantics of each might be.
Whoa, I am not a Randian, having not found her belief system all
that appealing. She grounds her theories solely in selfishness, not in
enlightened self interest. I wouldn’t want to live in her
world. I believe in more beneficence in political measures, not solely in
selfishness, which she elevated beyond all other considerations.
I find “moral” statements to be just as much personal
opinions as the ones I and others have posted here. Morality, IMHO, is in
the mind of the moralizer, and doesn’t translate well into facts and
rules for OTHERS to follow. The study of morality is useful for those of
us who want to determine our own morality, but should not be used as a basis
for law, other than stopping catastrophically immoral actions, such as violent
ones and imposing value judgments into law.
I would suggest you actually read Haidt's work. It's not as much about
moral statements. Very
briefly, in his "Moral Foundation Theory", he
identifies the following 5 fundamental categories which arise to various shades
of morality [2]:
- Care for
others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm)
- Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
- Loyalty to
your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as In-group)
- Respect for
tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as
Authority)
- Purity,
avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.
He argues that these 5 vectors account for many of the world`s
different moral codes and religious values. He interestingly also found a
correlation between which of these dimensions of morality are invoked (and in
what preference order) with political preferences of subjects in multiple
cultures (i.e. not just US undergrads).
In light of the Kenrick article above, we can combine the two to gain
one useful perspective and a start to semantics for self interest. From Kenrick
we learn that different notions of self-interest apply when the ecological
context is dominated by certain motivations, for instance regarding group
social dynamics (i.e. status, mating, affiliation, self-protection). The work
by Haidt can provide a grounding for some of the semantics in the rules
governing the social notions of self-interest.
For instance, appeals to In-group identification and Purity of said
groud, perhaps made through Authority easily leads to varieties of
self-interest that allow atrocities such as the holocaust in WWII, the
holocaust in Rwanada, the degradation of black people by South Africans, or further
in the past by the Americans, Europeans and Arabs. Appeals along these vectors
can also account for religious exclusion and domination by extremists of any of
the major faiths. Self-interest, but whence and for whom?
Similarly, appeals to the importance of caring and fairness can help
describe the notions of community self-interest that many North American
"liberals" or "humanists" espouse in practice. Again, these
are all at the higher, cognitive levels of self-interest, though perhaps
competition for scarce resources, or perceived inter-group threats factor in as
well.
[1] Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas
Griskevicius, Steven L. Neuberg and Mark Schaller. Renovating the Pyramid of Needs : Contemporary
Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundation. Perspectives on
Psychological Science 2010 5: 292 - http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/144040.pdf
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