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A bit on Conflict Theory...[d.umn.edu]

"For conflict theory, the basic insight is that human beings are sociable but conflict-prone animals. Why is there conflict? Above all else, there is conflict because violent coercion is always a potential resource, and it is zero-sum sort. This does not imply anything about the inherence of drives to dominate; what we do know firmly is that being coerced is an intrinsically unpleasant experience, and hence that any use of coercion, even by a small minority, calls forth conflict in the form of antagonism to being dominated. Add to this the fact that coercive power, especially as represented in the state, can be used to bring one economic goods and emotional gratification and to deny them to others and we can see that the availability of coercion as a resource ramifies conflicts throughout the entire society. The simultaneous existence of emotional bases for solidarity--which may well be the basis of cooperation, as Durkheim emphasized--only adds group divisions and tactical resources to be used in these conflicts."

govols 8 July 20
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Very Interesting conversation. I wish I had spotted it earlier on and I might have contributed. More people should read it.

I think Popper is flawed though.

Do you have a primary complaint with Popper?

@govols I did a Diploma in Higher Education in the UK. A segment of it was to look at the philosopy of science. The core book of the segment was a book called "What Is This Thing Called Science? " by Chalmers. - Very good and and not hard to read. I recommend it. I still have my copy from the mid 80s.

Please bear with me I did this course in the mid 1980s.so my explanation (from memory) may be off.

Basically what Popper is saying is that you cannot prove something you can only disprove (falsify) it. This is because if you use an observation statement to prove something and you may be mistaken.

In order to disprove something you must also use an observation statement and that may be equally wrong. If you accept this then it means you cannot falsify something just as you cannot prove something.

Popper developed his ideas further and had many followers and students. They claim to have overcome this problem but the logic was very convoluted.

I did not agree as did most of my class and tutors. Poppers work is useful in some ways but I feel it is flawed.

@Thasaidon

Okay, thanks. I think I see it. You'll forgive me, too, for I'm going beyond my range... My terribly basic understanding of Popper's premise:

If one supposes that all knowledge is incomplete and therefore provisional, subject to new findings, any hypothesis should be presented in a way that would be both predictive (useful), and make the conditions for its falsification self-evident.

@govols Popper's theory is useful in that on a common sense level if you cannot prove a theory right or prove it wrong (falsify it) it is not science. This is a useful test.

For example we cannot prove or disprove that there is a a christian god. This means a proposition about the existence of god is not a matter for science.

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Most of my scientific and engineering acquaintances take a dim view of sociology, psychology and even philosophy. At the same time they believe in evolution. If you were to take a hard line on the Karl Popper definition of science as being falsifiable you could apply that principle to all four. All four rely heavily on networks of cumulative evidence. Often statistical in nature that cannot be falsified by rigorous experimentation.

While the hard sciences use statistics the field of sociology is particularly dependent on them. How much of modern science is based on statistics is a matter of considerable debate. Einstein is reported to have said that if quantum theory is correct it signifies the end of physics as a science presumably to the extent that quantum physics is developed statistically. Statistics can be seen not as proof in the conventional scientific sense but as a measure of uncertainty. Einstein was a hard determinist so it's not surprising he took a hard line against the use of statistical models in physics. That said Einstein was not trying to wrestle with a complex chaotic system. He lived in a time when science was still reductionist. That may be appropriate for questions that are reducible to a relatively finite data set but there are practical reasons to address the relatively irreducible.

Technically you can assert that we live in a time where a new kind of science is emerging. It is more probabilistic than conventional science. It's reliance on statistical models coincides with the development of computing. In the past large data sets were simply impossible to deal with mathematically. Computers in a sense do not rely on sophisticated mathematics so much as brute force. Computers evolve solutions. The question is always if the evolved solutions correspond with reality. If your dealing with large data sets what empirical evidence supports a high probability of correspondence?

Perhaps the best answer is to simply accept that we live in a world of uncertainty. Correlation may not equal causation but often decisions that have to be made without certainty of causation. Sociology in this perspective can be seen as a dull tool. Some tools may be better than others but you use what is available.

The above is my attempt to justify the conversation while understanding that there is room for considerable scepticism.

I can't help but keep digging, but it's getting to where I'm going out too broad to keep track of it. What I'm going into right now is the interconnectedness of conflict and systems theories, but it's early yet. It looks like cybernetics is also going to require a basic survey, for it's ideas of unified field theory, along with your contribution to my efforts: swarm intelligence.

It looks like a bunch of anti-social psychopaths decided to learn and integrate every field of inquiry toward a twisted real world inversion of Plato's Republic. Almost every strand of 2020 crazy that I tug at seems to unravel back, not just decades or centuries, but through the ages.

In Republic (i'm only through about 6 or 7 books out of 10) Socrates and his cohort were exploring the question of the nature of justice, and the first answer was something like, "that which serves the interests of the powerful." The answer to today's question, "What is Social Justice?", arrived at over the course of centuries, seems to be that which brings to power the socio- psychopathic mid-wit managerial class.

@govols

I place a lot of the responsibility for the chaos on the Humanists who while struggling to overcome religious suppression allowed the new religion of social justice to take the place of traditional religion.

@wolfhnd, I see the point, for sure. I've been doing freaking Theology, too, and have been turning toward what ever brought to rise the universalist unitarians. It's looking like enlightenment scientific secularism combined with a desire to maintain the Sunday social, or some shit.

Do you know of any good overviews of systems theory, as applied to social rather than manufacturing management?

@govols

No, I'm not that well read and my memory is horrendously poor.

I'm satisfied with Jordan Peterson's take on the "system". It evolved for reasons some of which are obscure to us but civilization selects for competency. What competency means unfortunately is defined by the environment civilization creates. It's our job to discern what is necessary in that environment due to human nature and what is a product of "gene flow (or migration), genetic drift and the founder effect" in the memetic or cultural sense primarily but also in terms of how culture effects physical genetics.

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