Sunday, March 18, 2007
Adam Curtis' The Lonely Robot
Part of the BBC2 series "The Trap", full details here. This episode shows how in the 1990s politicians from both the right and the left tried to extend an idea of freedom based on the freedom of the market to all other areas of society. The basis of this new 'freedom' was "Game Theory". Even John Nash has now expressed some doubts about his model of simplistic selfish individuals. It is mainly believed nowadays that two groups in society actually behave in a rational self-interested way in all experimental situations. One is economists themselves, and the other is psychopaths.
IMO: I would certainly say it is true of psychopaths and of the misguided and of the spin merchants like "Greed is Good" Ivan Boesky. I take complex systems theory very seriously, in fact I'm writing several papers on it, and what the economists and psychologists would appear to have given the politicians is wildly oversimplified.
It is pathetic to see leaders in two major countries at least, Britain and America, falling for this nightmarish pseudoscientific flapdoodle. (Though I reiterate very strongly that that certainly does not apply to the topics considered, just to oversimplified presentations that the politicians have accepted and taken for their own ends). According to Curtis, it seems, for example, that was the reason why Gordon Brown allowed (perhaps reasonably anyway) the Bank of England to dictate interest rates and it gave Clinton an excuse to tolerate the greed of the medical establishment.
The idea behind the mathematical system was to liberate public servants from old forms of bureaucratic control and workers were free to meet their targets anyway they wanted - total crap. The sort of thing that led to was that in one hospital patients were phoned up and asked when they were taking their holidays and the operations were then scheduled for the time they'd be away.
We see the bad effects as reported elsewhere in earlier posts here with regard to such matters as policing, medicine and the politics of local or national devolution.
Britain under New Labour is now even more unequal than it was under Margaret Thatcher with more and more wealth going to the tiny one percent at the top. Since 1997 differences in life expectancy and also in child mortality in different regions have increased too.
When confronted with a desperate predicament, the Northern German is said to take the attitude that "the situation is serious, but not hopeless" whereas the Southern German, confronting the same predicament, would take the attitude that "the situation is hopeless, but not serious". With the southern attitude, Paul Watzlawick offers a simple solution to seemingly impossible predicaments. One predicament is choosing to operate on the world the way one thinks it should be instead of the way it is.
IMO: Watzlawick says of people like Toady B. Liar , "As captain of his ship, which the rats (in this case the behavioural scientists) have already abandoned, he heroically steers into the stormy night." With Toady out of the way, it is possible that New Labour may still present workable policies. Milliband's approach to climate change, for example, if not 100% correct at least has political merit.
IMO: I would certainly say it is true of psychopaths and of the misguided and of the spin merchants like "Greed is Good" Ivan Boesky. I take complex systems theory very seriously, in fact I'm writing several papers on it, and what the economists and psychologists would appear to have given the politicians is wildly oversimplified.
It is pathetic to see leaders in two major countries at least, Britain and America, falling for this nightmarish pseudoscientific flapdoodle. (Though I reiterate very strongly that that certainly does not apply to the topics considered, just to oversimplified presentations that the politicians have accepted and taken for their own ends). According to Curtis, it seems, for example, that was the reason why Gordon Brown allowed (perhaps reasonably anyway) the Bank of England to dictate interest rates and it gave Clinton an excuse to tolerate the greed of the medical establishment.
The idea behind the mathematical system was to liberate public servants from old forms of bureaucratic control and workers were free to meet their targets anyway they wanted - total crap. The sort of thing that led to was that in one hospital patients were phoned up and asked when they were taking their holidays and the operations were then scheduled for the time they'd be away.
We see the bad effects as reported elsewhere in earlier posts here with regard to such matters as policing, medicine and the politics of local or national devolution.
Britain under New Labour is now even more unequal than it was under Margaret Thatcher with more and more wealth going to the tiny one percent at the top. Since 1997 differences in life expectancy and also in child mortality in different regions have increased too.
When confronted with a desperate predicament, the Northern German is said to take the attitude that "the situation is serious, but not hopeless" whereas the Southern German, confronting the same predicament, would take the attitude that "the situation is hopeless, but not serious". With the southern attitude, Paul Watzlawick offers a simple solution to seemingly impossible predicaments. One predicament is choosing to operate on the world the way one thinks it should be instead of the way it is.
IMO: Watzlawick says of people like Toady B. Liar , "As captain of his ship, which the rats (in this case the behavioural scientists) have already abandoned, he heroically steers into the stormy night." With Toady out of the way, it is possible that New Labour may still present workable policies. Milliband's approach to climate change, for example, if not 100% correct at least has political merit.
# posted by uv : 9:01 PM
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