> But later philosophers came up with much better solutions
Yes, later than both Smith and Marx. Marginalism didn't go mainstream until the 1890s, though the necessary pieces were there waiting to be assembled from about 1870.
Unless you're doing math (and are willing to take first order logic as a priori true) you need to start with something. Learning about the world requires data, data requires identifying a data source, and identifying a data source requires knowing at least one thing about the world.
As foundations go, it's hard to see how you could go any deeper than "I am having an experience".
> simply be what that conscious thing experiences when a set of neurons is activated in a particular way?
That is what it is, but that's totally independent of whether they're physical. One is a sign pointing to the thing, the other is a claim about the characteristics of the thing.
"This is a question mark: ?"
versus
"A question mark is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative phrase."
versus
"A question mark is half to three quarters of a roughly circular shape, open at the lower left, with a small line segment at the bottom followed by an open space and then a dot."
I'm comparing Afrikaners to the English and to South African blacks who were integrating into colonial society (among whom the Zulu were likely the largest ethnic group, but certainly not an outright majority). Afrikaner national identity initially formed in opposition to the former and shifted to defining itself against the latter as the country began industrializing.
> Okay, but this is not at all what Marx himself said. Marx was philosophically opposed in all of his writings to answering even the most basic questions about what a communist economy/government would look like. In his mind he was only proclaiming the inevitability of such a system.
No, the point is that he's not talking about a particular system. The famous soundbite from The German Ideology:
> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Communism, for Marx, is the thing that beats capitalism, and he's only willing to make claims about it that he thinks follow from that. He believes it will lack the features of capitalism that undermine its long term stability, and do a better job than capitalism of accomplishing the things that a mode of production needs to do to win out over others (namely, producing things), but anything more than that cannot be predicted decades-to-centuries out. Things will need to be administered, but they're not going to be administered by him, or in circumstances he can predict.
Consider feudalism. An educated Frenchman in 1700 could reasonably think that feudalism was on the way out, that it would probably mean the displacement of the aristocracy by the emerging bourgeoisie, that it would not have a patchwork legal system built out of a thousand years of accumulated hereditary agreements and local precedent, that it would professionalize government to some degree, that it would do a better job of maintaining a professional military, and so on. But they had no chance whatsoever of predicting the structure of the Federal Reserve, and it would be insane of them to claim otherwise.
> But that efficiency of the current state, but doesn't seem to take account of the evolution that happened to get to that point. Has anyone measured the work it takes to get the market to that endpoint? Is there even a name for this concept?
I don't know of a term for this in particular, but the keywords to search for are "entry" and "social inefficiency".
> This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal
The labor theory of value was accepted wisdom prior to the late 19th century: it originates with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It's wrong (or more accurately, not a good conceptual framework) but it's not obviously wrong, let alone "idiotic".
> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed.
Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.
> My impression is that they're what scott calls "my dinner guests."
Yes, he's pathologically friendly towards anyone to his right: part and parcel of not taking them that seriously.
> Seriously I cannot find anything in his writing that is incompatible with those movements and beliefs.
He's a centrist neoliberal, ala Matt Yglesias. In some ways the two groups are mirror images. Paraphrasing someone, though I don't remember who:
capitalism ostensibly has two functions:
- Concentrate power in the hands of individuals who successfully "move fast and break things"
- Efficiently allocate resources through impersonal market mechanisms.
These are not fully compatible. Neoliberals aren't exactly anti-oligarch, and neoreactionaries aren't exactly anti-market, but when the two tendencies clash they're on opposite sides.
Scott doesn't hate people like Thiel, which marks him as not-left, but he's clearly not interested in doing away with liberal democracy and making him CEO of America.
The relevant outgroups animating Afrikaner nationalism aren't the Zulu (or Xhosa, or Tswana, etc.) as a whole, but rather the rapidly growing black working class on the one hand, and English-speaking elites on the other. Of course Afrikaner society was and had long between hideously racist, but so was the British colonial government. It was the perceived "threat" of racial integration (and the attendant economic competition) driven by English liberals that made race the primary focus of Afrikaner politics.
Of course if you mean smaller differences that weren't in part ultimately caused by proximity, there aren't any, but that's almost tautological.
It's just the latest rebranding of Nick Land's ideology/performance art/shitposting. "Capital will devour human civilization: here's why that's a good thing."
e/acc is an internet meme. The underlying ideological group, to the extent that there is one, is the "reactionary modernism"/"Californian Ideology"/"New Right"/"neoreactionary" cluster.
My impression is that for Scott they're what he calls a "fargroup": weird and bad in theory, but not salient enough to provoke a real response in practice. The way modern people feel about Genghis Khan. But I have very mixed feelings about Scott and extremely negative feelings about neoreactionaries, so take that with a grain of salt.
> Every single human conflict can be described as "small differences" because humans are very similar to each other.
He's obviously talking about differences which are small by human standards. The rest of the paragraph:
> If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.
He has a house in Vermont, a one-bedroom apartment in DC, and a lakefront cabin. For an upper middle class octogenarian, that's completely unremarkable. Most American software engineers could easily do the same by middle age.
In practice "Communism" means Leninism and its descendants, or occasionally revolutionary Marxism in general. No one reasonable would ever use it to refer to the likes of Olof Palme.
> him having personally experienced Soviet brutality didn't have the luxury of being ignorant of reality.
Allied troops didn't reach Hungary until 1944, and the Soviet-backed coup occurred in 1947. von Neumann moved to Germany in 1926, and to the US in 1933.
> Von Neumann was right about everything
He wanted the US to start WWIII with a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.
Somethings are simply bad for you, without qualification, but for the most part it only makes sense to use "healthy" or "unhealthy" to describe a diet, not individual foods.
Milk has lots of protein, minerals, and fat. Whether that's good or bad depends on how much of those you're getting from other sources.
Yes, later than both Smith and Marx. Marginalism didn't go mainstream until the 1890s, though the necessary pieces were there waiting to be assembled from about 1870.