Common Sense and Mansplaining

This was an interesting podcast, interviewing Gerd Gigerenzer who I thought was Dutch but is actually German, about his new book which extols the value of common sense and the ability of humans to continually out-think machines.  There was a very interesting ongoing discussion with Russ Roberts who hosts the Econtalk podcast and has done since it began in 2006.  There is a great deal of consideration of various aspects of surveillance and artificial intelligence.  Russ as usual displayed his biases (devout Republican) and blind spots (he criticizes surveillance states but loves living in Israel, which is a particularly advanced surveillance state).

https://www.econtalk.org/extra/common-sense-anyone/

The podcast offers insights into how various aspects of our digitized experience boil things down into simple numbers which are easy to digest and understand, with reference in this instance to the Chinese social score system.  These pearl clutching critiques of the Chinese social score system, ignoring the multitude of similar scores (credit scores, academic scores, financial net worth, heart rate, likes, etc) we have in the Western context often fall flat with me, not because I particularly like the Chinese system but because it ignores the fact we already have a social scoring system in our current social system.  

Many people find quantitative things good and effective at sorting people one from the other, they always have, people love to be able to sort their fellow human beings and competitive.  What I find bizarre is the visceral reaction this triggers in the podcast hosts.  However this also, at the same time does not make the hosts consider their own context, whereby a whole variety of social scores favor them in their own context (their qualifications, their wealth, their age, their experience, etc).  If you were to reveal this complete contradiction to these mansplainers, their brains would boil and they would consider their own circumstance to be different from these evil social controlling Chinese.  However if you boil this down, it's the same thing.  Chinese social scores and grades at school and financial net worth are just different ways of measuring similar aspects.

Econtalk is a useful podcast, all I can say is it helps me understand our right wing enemies, their intellectual fluidity and hypocrisy and also their manifest cowardice and weaknesses.

The need for a tightly organized party structure

The importance of the revolutionary dynamic.  In all of the revolutions which have taken place thus far there are always a number of important factors which contribute to the success of the overthrow of the prior regime.

1)  The existing regime must be weak or at least fragmented.

2) There must be an organization to replace the existing state organization.  Co-opting the existing organization will lead to an end to the revolution. Slowly.

3) There must be a broad societal basis to the revolution.  For example a substantial issue which acts as a unifying point for non-homogenous groups to organize around.

4) The role of outside actors must either be neutralized or obviated.  If they are not then the revolution simply becomes a form of conquest or invasion or coersion by an outside party.