We need a new philosophy of progress

Doesn't Gibbard's theorem retain most of Arrow's bite?

Republic is the reference. I'm not going to take the hours it would take to give book-and-paragraph citations, because either you haven't read the the entire Republic, or else you've read it, but you want to argue that each of the many terrible things he wrote don't actually represent Plato's opinion or desire.

(You know it's a big book, right? 89,000 words in the Greek.  If you read it in a collection or anthology, it wasn't the whole Republic.)

The task of arguing over what in /Republic/ Plato approves or disapproves of is arduous and, I think, unnecessary.

First, everybody agrees that the topic of Republic is "social justice", and Plato makes his position on that clear, in Republic and in his other works: Justice is when everybody accepts the job and the class they're born into, without any grumbling or backtalk, and Plato is king and tells everybody what to do.  His conclusion, that justice is when everybody minds their own business (meaning they don't get involved in politics, which should be the business of  philosophers), is clearly meant as a direct refutation of Pericles' summary of Athenian values in his famous funeral oration: "We do not say that a man who shows no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all."

When the topic of the book is social justice, and you get to the end and it says "Justice is when everyone does what I say and stays in their place", you should throw that book in the trash.

(This is a bit unfair to Plato, because the Greek word he used meant something more like "righteousness".  "justice" is a lousy translation.  But this doesn't matter to me, because I don't care what Plato meant as much as I care about how people use it; and the Western tradition is to say that Plato was talking about justice.  And it's still a totalitarian conclusion, whether you call it "justice" or "righteousness".)

This view of justice (or righteousness) is consistent with his life and his writings.  He seems to support slavery as natural and proper, though he never talks about it directly; see Vlastos 1941, Slavery in Plato's Thought.  He literally /invented/ racism, in order to theorize that a stable, race-based state, in which the inferior races were completely conditioned and situated so as to be incapable of either having or acting on independent desires or thoughts, would have neither the unrest due to social mobility that democratic Athens had, nor the periodic slave revolts that Sparta had.  He and his clan preferred Sparta to Athens; his uncle, a fellow student of Socrates, was the tyrant of Athens in 404 BC, appointed by Sparta; and murdered 1500 Athenian citizens, mostly for supporting democracy.  Socrates was probably executed in 399 BC not for being a "gadfly", but because the Athenians believed that they'd lost the war with Sparta thanks to the collusion of Socrates' students with Sparta.

Plato had personal, up-close experience of the construction of a bloody totalitarian state, and far from ever expressing a word of disapproval of it, he mocked at least one of its victims in Republic, and continued to advocate totalitarian policies in his writings, such as /The Laws/.  He was a wealthy aristocrat who wanted to destroy democracy and bring back the good old days when you couldn't be taken to court just for killing a slave, as evidenced by the scorn he heaps on working people and merchants in many of his dialogues, and also his jabs at Athens and democracy; and by the Euthyphro, a dialogue with a man who's a fool for taking his father to court for killing a slave.

One common defense of Plato is that his preferred State was the first state he described, the "true state", in which everyone gets just what they need to survive; he actually detested the second, "fevered state", in which people have luxuries (which, he says, can only ever be had by theft and war--property is theft!)

I find this implausible, or at best hypocritical, for several reasons.

• It's in line with the persona of Socrates, but not at all in line with Plato's actual life of luxury as a powerful and wealthy man.
• Plato spends a few paragraphs describing the "true state", and the rest of Republic describing the "fevered state" or defending or elaborating on its controversial aspects.
• He supports the totalitarian polices, such as banning all music, poetry, and art other than government propaganda, with arguments which are sometimes solid if you accept Plato's philosophy.
• Many of the controversial aspects of the "fevered state" are copied from Sparta, which Plato admired, and which his friends and family fought for against their own city; and direct opposites of Athens, which he hated.

The simplest reading of Republic, I think, is that the second state he described is one he liked to dream about, but knew wasn't plausible.

But my second reason for thinking this debate over Plato's intent is unimportant is that people don't usually read Republic for its brief description of the "true state". Either they just read the first 2 or 3 books and a few other extracts carefully chosen by professors to avoid all the nasty stuff and give the impression that Plato was legitimately trying to figure out what justice means like he claimed; or they read it to get off on the radical policies of the fevered state (which is the political equivalent of BDSM porn).

Some of the policies of that state include: breeding citizens like cattle into races that must be kept distinct, with philosophers telling everyone whom to have sex with, sometimes requiring brothers and sisters to have sex with each other (5.461e); allowing soldiers on campaign to rape any citizen they want to (5.468c); dictating jobs by race; abolishing all art, poetry, and music except government propaganda; banning independent philosophy; the death sentence for repeatedly questioning authority; forbidding doctors from wasting their time on people who are no longer useful to the State because they're old or permanently injured; forced abortions of all children conceived without the State's permission (including for all women over age 40 and all men over age 55); forbidding romantic love, marriage, or raising your own children; outlawing private property (5.464); allowing any citizen to violently assault any other citizen, in order to encourage citizens to stay physically fit (5.464e); and founding of the city by killing everyone over the age, IIRC, of 10.  (He writes "exiling", but you would have to kill them to get them all to give up their children; see e.g. Cambodia).

The closest anybody ever came to implementing the ideas in /Republic/ (which was not a republic, and which Plato actually titled /Polis/, "The State") was Sparta (which it was obviously based on).  The second-closest was Nazi Germany (also patterned partly on Sparta).  /Brave New World/ is also similar, though much freer.

I haven't read Pinker's "Better Angels" but I've heard that it is both (1) hopeful and (2) potentially has some cherry-picked data? (The caveman stuff I think is very plausible. It is the post-1800 stuff that I think might be cherry-picked.)

Do you think I should read it directly and trust that the data and stats are clean, or should it be mixed somehow with other content. I'd love to get a "highlights and lowlights" summary by someone with epistemic rigor such that I could save time and avoid reading it myself <3

Before that book came out, my working theory was less optimistic, and more straightforward and grew out of the intellectual tradition of Lewis Richardson's pacificism-motivated war (or peace) studies work, where a stationary statistical distribution is assumed (thus we assume no moral progress?) unless it can be positively proven and attributed to something.  

Here is a modern example of research on the causal structure of war which suggests that if an-event-plausibly-describable-as-WW3 does not occur until after roughly 2103-2163, then we could decisively say that the post-WW2-Long-Peace is a true deviation from historical trends based on some enduring change to the statistical distribution from which actual historical wars may have been sampled since the invention of muskets and cannons and so on.

Aaron Clauset's discussion section is interesting here:

The agreement between the historical record of interstate wars and Richardson’s simple model of their frequency and severity is truly remarkable, and it stands as a testament to Richardson’s lasting contribution to the study of violent political conflict.

There are, however, a number of caveats, insights, and questions that come out of our analysis. For instance, Richardson’s Law—a power-law distribution in conflict event sizes—appears to hold only for sufficiently large “deadly quarrels,” specifically those with 7061 or more battle deaths. The lower portion of the distribution is slightly more curved than expected for a simple power law, which suggests potential differences in the processes that generate wars above and below this threshold.

With only 95 conflicts and a heavy-tailed distribution of war sizes, there are relatively few large wars to consider. This modest sample size surely lowers the statistical power of any test and is likely partly to blame for needing nearly 100 more years to know whether the long peace pattern is more than a run of good luck under a stationary process. One could imagine increasing the sample size by including civil wars, which are about three times more numerous than interstate wars over 1823–2003. Including these, however, would confound the resulting interpretation, because civil wars have different underlying causes [10, 43, 48], and because the distribution of civil war sizes is shifted toward smaller conflicts and exhibits relatively fewer large ones [24].

My own tendency is just to treat nearly all violence as "just violence" and so if two guys get in a fight in a bar, and their buddies jump in and start fighting "anyone who isn't a buddy of mine" (no personal beefs, but rather treating others merely as members of an enemy group), and 3 people die in that bar fight, then I'd model that as a battle with 3 casualties. 

If there's a shooting later that kills 7, inspired by that fight, that's another battle with 7 casualties, which is arguably a continuation of the "war"(?)... and so on. Most people don't agree with my coding preference here, possibly for good reasons that I just haven't learned yet? Turchin treats violent protests separately from wars (bigger) or crime (smaller), but this might be essentially data pragmatism?

Censoring the smaller events from the database of "wars" based on semantics and treating the lack of "wars so-defined" as a lack of "the bad violence that we're officially studying (not the other violence that we are NOT officially studying)" seems questionable to me.

For me, the small scale version generates vivid examples from common experience that illustrate my current best guess as to why "conflict sizes" have a distribution similar to "earthquake sizes"!

There is a potential in BOTH social-animal conflict AND geophysical avalanches for common small events and then also rare cascading amplification of released tension.

Maybe adding the little events in somehow would just recover Richardson's Law more strongly and/or it might show a clearer post-WW2-change? Maybe? A lot of sins can hide in data cleaning, data-gap imputing, and event coding choices.

Based on background knowledge and interest like this, I'm curious if Pinker looked at the literature and found evidence that the real story was quite clear, or if he just sort of... uh... wrote something that sounded good?

In my model, the first step is to have a clear theory of causation that is scientifically coherent, and then if the theory of causation is adequate you can "imagine an intervention and mentally turn the gears [LW · GW]" and then see if the results would be "less war" or what. Then the cheapest imaginable intervention that buys the most predicted goodness should perhaps be tried? And that would be "optimistic rational progress at work!" <3

Capitalist success lies in its ability to utilize economical/technological progress for the sake of a very large group which, as the living conditions went better and better, included nearly all of the society.

Problem is we are not at that stage anymore.

 I never claimed there is something wrong with bourgeoise....

Progress, aka moving forward from current state of art is done by inventing things which requires one to know the fundamental principles in his field. Scientist is not a job but engineer is.  One can be scientist and engineer at the same time.

Bourgeoise is essentially, through leftist/marxist narrative, a group of people who held capital. And they used this capital to finance scientists of their time or they were those scientists, and through that they ensured economical progress.

The main argument here is that a group/class of people ensure progress for their own betterment. If we would like to have a philosophy for progressivism, we need to have an agenda. For whom this progress is for? And how to finance it? What is our moral foundation of operating this progress? And so on.

I want an accurate vision of the future.

Perfect! Glad to know you're on it.