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On Thursday, August 18, 2011 10:19 PM Ron Weeler wrote: "Is anyone actually
interested in creating a Self Interest Ontology?
If so, can someone propose a
set of metadata that might describe this proposed ontology."
Better, as a tag cloud as of the Web 2.0. Or, even as the knowledge tags
with descriptions, categorizations, classifications, hyperlinks, and hyperdata
with semantics, as initiated by Collaborative Search Engines like Jumper 2.0.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 10:41
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Self
Interest Ontology going offline
The topic indeed needs more
focusing and concentration but in the context of ontology, keeping away from
politics, economics, history, and all sorts of the mass
media's sensations and anecdotes, however amusing it might be.
To proceed, the key things are
requested, namely:
- To define the domains of self-interests
as biological reality, cognitive reality, or social reality.
- To see how the realities are
interrelated by actions and activities.
- To specify the system of related
concepts as selfishness, altruism, and unselfishness; motivation, need, or
drive; morality and immorality; intelligence and knowledge.
- To identify principal agents, forces,
causes, and behaviors, interactions and relationships in such
realities.
- To perform the ontological
cleaning of the enlightened self-interests and unenlightened self-interests;
people can only act in their own interests, people consider their needs,
desires, and well-being as priorities; people are obliged to help
others, people are obliged to pursue national interests, etc.
- To study the effects of greed or
unenlightened self-interests or rational selfishness, like the tragedy of
commons, when multiple individuals consulting their own self-interests
destroy the community, quality of life, common causes, public property,
environment, and ecology.
Azamat Abdoullaev
PS: Again, the issues like why the
mega-rich shed crocodile tears over the plight of America are more relevant to
social scientists, psychologists, moralists, politicians, and tax
inspectors.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 8:45
PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Self
Interest Ontology going offline
Hi Rich,
I have two comments. One, a meta-observation about keeping the
discussion on topic, and the other about your request about how to move
forward.
You have previously suggested that some on the list object to the
discussion of politics, I can only speak for myself... I don't mind the use
of examples from politics to motivate or ground discussions, what I find
irritating are snippets like what's quoted below:
On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 11:01 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The
Democrat justifications are legendary.
Look at the Keynesian policies, which have not worked. Look at QE1,
QE2, the possible QE3 to come, and
the onerous taxes on businesses that are so high,
they won't
bring home money made in other countries
due to the high tax rates?
Opinions such as this are peppered in your
contributions which are, imo, laden with value judgments that are not
related to the matter at hand. I fail to see how these paragraphs offer
anything in terms of working towards a self-interest ontology. Rather, I see
someone asserting unfounded opinion as fact. Sometimes, when this is becomes
rather egregious, someone might chime in with a correction. To wit, see this
piece written by a high-profile, wealthy individual that directly
contradicts your previous opinions masquerading as fact re income tax
( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?_r=2 ).
So, as far as I go, I'm not averse to using political examples for
ontology-related purposed -- I do tire of seeing a particular individual's
political opinions (in my
opinion, demonstrably false, and in fact, adding to a larger environment of
misinformation) fill the list, especially when the
relation to ontology is tenuous. What makes it particularly frustrating is
that for someone else to come in and correct these statements means
that the discussion veers further away from ontology. Do you see why some
people would object to such emails and hence the pleading to exercise more
judgment before sending a note?
As to your query:
[RC]
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to proceed
in
light
of our differences?
Comments,
suggestions, constructive ontolog
fragments
will be appreciated.
I can see why you, based in a Randian outlook, would begin with
self-interest. You might want to consider refocusing on the broader idea of
"motivations", whereby self-interest is just one of many types of
motivations that drive human (or organism) action.
I shared two sources which imo are a good grounding points and I'll add
a third.
The updated Maslow based hierarchy provides a good starting point for
individual human motivations [1]. It also explicitly takes into account how
people have differing motivations depending on their physical, social and
life-stage context.
Jonathan Haidt and others work on the origins and variations of
morality, provide another useful avenue into how various values and
value-systems come to drive motivations, especially at the social-group
setting[2].
Neither posits an explicitly political stance, and the vocabulary
deployed in each, can be used to describe what you see as conflicting
political opinions.
George Lakoff, in his book Moral Politics [3] also provides
an interesting perspective for how the community or social organizations can
be viewed. According to Avril and Richard's language, it is at a slightly
higher level of description than an immediate ontology of self-interest or
motivation. However, he does provide quite explicit mappings for common
(American) political stances, which are derived from a "Nation as Family"
metaphor. For example, in that book he posits that "Conservatives"
often employ the "Strict Father Metaphor" for how a society should function,
whereas "Liberals" prefer a "Nurturant Parent" metaphor. While both
perspectives draw on the same set of metaphors regarding morality and
growth, they order them differently, leading to conflicting policy
prescriptions. So that too might be another avenue to reconcile the apparent
differences you note.
[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
[2] Haidt,
J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In
S. Fiske, D. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.) Handbook of Social Psychology,
5th Edition. Hobeken, NJ: Wiley. Pp. 797-832.
Best,
Ali
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