Sociological Critique
I'm a sucker for wasting time on YouTube, but the above video is just about the best time wasting I've had on the site all year - and I encourage everyone here to give it a look. What I love about it is that it speaks to what I think ought to be the basic analytical instinct for anyone attempting to discuss social problems: the instinct to look not at the behaviour of individuals, but at the social milieux by which any such behaviour is conditioned.
The idea - not too controversial I hope - is that the typical behaviour of individuals in society is shaped - but not 'determined' - by what might be called the 'incentive structureâ of that society: the rough system of rewards, punishments, pleasures, accolades and disincentives that permeate it. The video uses the board game Monopoly as its exemplar: regardless of the values or moral dispositions of the individuals involved, the win-conditions of the game are such that the more greedy and ruthless you are, the more successful you will be - and this will be the case regardless of how âgoodâ or âbadâ you are as a person.
I think this is important to emphasise because too often - in my opinion - does social discussion focus on the 'psychology' or the âvalues' of individuals involved in any one situation. One absolutely debilitating side-effect this has is that of de-politicizing social issues: of foreclosing routes of collective action that would change incentives at a society-wide level, as opposed to moralising about the âvaluesâ of individuals (or even the âvaluesâ of society). On the kind of sociological reading presented in the video above, âvaluesâ would be derivative explananda: they take hold only to the extent that their cultivation leads to âsuccessfulâ outcomes. But the point of course, would be to change what counts as success in the first place.
To put it in a pithy formula, one might put it like this: when confronted with a social problem, never look 'in' - always look 'out'! Either way - watch the video! Spoilers for Wall-E ahead.
Comments (93)
How can it not, though? Is there an individual or are we collectively better off being saturated by such a system that wall-e is nothing more than a disruption to this absence of self-awareness? Was the BNL system formulated to save humanity from self-destruction, the destruction of individualism or has being on 'autopilot' as mindless drones actually destroyed humanity? It is a very difficult dilemma because the problem, for me anyway, is moral development or the lack thereof because what initiates any authentic understanding of the difference between right and wrong is demonstrated by a type of individual consciousness. This consciousness is found in the curiosity that leads to love, Eva, the one in search of 'life' because if we do what we are told as automatons - including acts of "good" - that don't stem from this individual consciousness, everyone would be sociopathic since none of our feelings would be real.
A person without any sense of moral consciousness would indeed be compelled to a system that takes advantage of the infantile or instinctual nature of the brain and so the axiom to this mind control is psychological because it stimulates the pleasures of leading the 'path of the least resistance'.
But I don't see an either-or relation here: we are individuals to the extent that we belong to a 'system', or rather a series of systems that generally travels under the name 'society': the relevant question is one of relation - what kind of relation to society is it that we want to cultivate? Not: are we better off in a society or not? The latter question isn't one that can be entertained in any meaningful way, as far as I'm concerned. Else you end up peddling liberal sophistries about individuals set against society and so on - a total non-starter for any meaningful political discussion.
One way to illustrate what I'm trying to get at here is with another example maybe. Here is Corey Robin, a political scientist, talking about the discourse of 'norm erosion' that has become popular in talking about Trump these days:
"So we have a discourse of norm erosion that allows us to reel in shock at the way that Trump talks to senators, governors, and citizens, but that discourse has nothing to say about the very system, the very text, that produced this president that talks in this terrible and shocking way. Indeed, insofar as some of the peddlers of that discourse believe that these cherished norms ultimately issue from the system and the text itself, and that it is that system and that text that need protecting, one can say that the discourse of norm erosion actually prevents us from tackling the very system, the very text, that produced this president that talks in this terrible and shocking way."
The overvalorization of the individual partakes of the exact same problem: I mean, of course Trump is a complete monstrosity, but to focus on the personal failings of Trump is to miss the fact that there was an entire system which put him into power. And any intervention into the state of things ought to pitch itself at that system, not at Trump, per se. The liberal media obsession with Trump's personality does as much to feed into the very conditions that brought him into power as anything else. Part of why the media are having such a hard time grappling with the flood of sexual abuse allegations is in part this same attitude: the petty gossip-mag obsession with 'personalities' which blind us to system-level incentive structures that - however subtly and implicitly - enable such behaviour.
That latter question is a very dangerous (albeit kind of awesome) place to tread and you would need to tread carefully. I fear empiricism because moral consciousness is not sourced by an ability to transcend the system making us trapped by our sensory experiences, which would make it justifiable to cultivate a system best suited to this inevitable subservience and that is what politics, community, family do as each interpret and formulate system upon system in an attempt reconcile the individual with society. From my favourite film, Ghost in a Shell (the anime of course): âIf we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. It's simple: over-specialise, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death.â
What we refer to as 'individualism' borne from this system is ideological; are the answers that I give in a survey my opinion as an 'individual' or have the questions been formulated to reinforce collective standards that I align myself with and in doing so trick myself into believing that the choices I make benchmark my individualism in contrast to those who choose differently to me. This 'individualism' - as is visible in the US - is an imagined construct where the system has enabled the conditions that mirage individual consciousness when really they blindly move in masses. But it does not make our capacity of thinking with an authentic conscience or consciousness impossible.
Why do we need to separate free-will and determinism and create some sort of conflict between the two? Why do we need to separate the individual and society? Can we not just transcend through it?
You realize the ultimate move against the incentive structures as a system is for individuals to choose antinatalism. Of course, the goal is not to make a new system that is set up for successful outcomes for antinatalism, but rather it is antinatalism as rebellion against all systems. It is Wall-E moving off his predetermined track, but to its furthest extent. Keep in mind that all systems are instrumental in their own way, and the new system set up by the captain at the end will be instrumental in keeping other paths of least resistance going, but for no reason.
Also Antinatalism lol.
Was that responding to my post? I never mentioned authentic consciousness. Are you saying the antinatalist stance presupposes some authentic conscience stance towards life? If so, can you define that term more clearly other than me obviously putting two words together to make my own conclusion? Authenticity in existentialism is defined I guess as being true to one's own character without trying to fit into a role. It is going to a shitty job but not losing yourself in the role of the shitty job. The only value in this existentialist theme, to me, is that it tries to rip you out of taking the roles you play in any sociological event too seriously. However, authenticity itself i part of the system. What better way to make you think that you are the hero of your own destiny than this idea of the "authentic individual" as opposed to those who take their roles in society too seriously. What better types of tropes than movies like the Matrix that pretend like you can free yourself as the authentic individual?
How it is you seemingly quote Zizek and yet purport relevance to what kind of relation to society it is that we want to cultivate is beyond me. That is how the faux 'authenticity' behind genocides are legitimised just like how power is reinforced by so-called 'individualism' where opinions move in masses. IF there is authenticity within this consciousness, there would be universal morals and genocide would cease to exist since the 'poetry' here is ideology.
Ah, ostracism by omission. Got it.
But Zizek's point is that the authenticity of those who carry out genocides is anything but 'faux': it's the real deal. The point is that 'authenticity' is an entirely 'neutral' element, it can be put to use in any which way. The problem isn't the 'content' of authenticity: it's it's very form which can be appropriated in any which way.
See:
I prefer this YouTube video:
Schwarzenegger initially has the social system opposed to him, but he finds a way to convert it to his side, and then becomes unstoppable, and gets all the favouritism he needs to fulfil his goal.
In this world, nobody will put victory in your pocket. You have to earn it, you have to struggle and fight by yourself, you alone can make something of yourself. Not the community, etc. - that is nonsense. The community is always mobilised and used as a tool by individuals. By the Alexanders, the Khans, the Ghandis, the Buddhas, etc.
In Eastern Europe there is a wave of extremist politics, mostly socialist, but also some far-right movements. All these people are blaming the others - it's the fault of the others that things are bad. The politicians, etc. But that's false. It's your fault - you weren't smart enough to control all those corrupt politicians, etc. Intelligence can never blame its failings on the others. It is always its own failure to manipulate social conditions as it needed to manipulate them.
Peter Thiel wrote about this, but millennials are a failed and depressed generation, by and large, most of them will fail to make anything out of their lives. They won't even reach the levels of their parents. They are pessimistic and do not take responsibility for their failures, always looking to blame the other.
Yes, I am well aware that that's what it wants to contest. I don't see it as successfully doing that at all. Just a fantasy.
It wants to say that the self or the individual is "created" by society and the social system around, but the individual with a community of other individuals has the power to change the system. How's this different from Marxism? :s (let's see, it's not... )
Workers of the world unite. Revolution. That's what it's saying. And I say revolution is bunk, because revolution is guided by an individual, not by a community.
Marxism has by and large become identified with social science. Marx always claimed he was doing social (and economic) science, not Marxism for that matter.
Yeah, I get you claim that, I'd like to see some proof. I look around, and I look through history, and I see that the big changes in society occur as a result of individuals, not collective action (unless that collective action is also driven by an individual, like Ghandi).
It's bizarre the way you keep repeating the same mistake as if you wanted to prove how necessary the discussion is. Thanks. I think.
Outline the mistake, show how it is a mistake, etc. - do some work. Not just pointing fingers.
http://bfy.tw/A0J5
https://goo.gl/8sYr6B
Don't you think a sensible first step in sociological critique would be to examine the lens through which you yourself view social relations instead of simply presenting it as the ultimate viewing aid? If you don't do that you'll blindly project onto your critique the results of your own immersion in the social milieu you find yourself in and that will completely undermine your analysis. So, yes through your unexamined lens in the context of the particular society that's formed you, you think we should look at individuals rather than society as a whole when understanding social change. That's not sociological critique in itself but simply a demonstration of what happens when it's not undertaken.
If one happens to wear specs, this can easily enough be managed, but removing one's eyeball to examine it is not so sensible. Instead, use the mirror of relationship - visit an optician.
Well, in anticipation of Agu's reply I was going to talk about the deeper issue of being unable to escape a hall of mirrors but at least knowing you're in one, which is a parallel metaphor I think.
No, actually I don't. It's not any more sensible than when writing an instruction manual for welding I would examine the lens through which I actually view the process of welding instead of simply presenting it as the actual view that must be adopted.
Likewise, I cannot separate the successful life from the way the successful man views life. If you get out of the spectacles you can see things differently, but that doesn't actually help with the process of living well. One of the goals of philosophy is the good life, and it seems to me that the lens chosen are part of what makes the good life possible.
So yes, my view of social relations is the one I use. But why do I use it? Because I've seen it be successful for me and for others.
Quoting Baden
Again, the question is what forms an agent of change (whether positive or negative)? And the answer is, among other things, a particular way of viewing the world. How can you disengage the process of causing change from the spectacles that permit one to see that process itself?
From the above, the question of the OP is something like: "How do we most successfully approach a critical analysis of social problems?" and the thesis is that we look out at the social milieu not in to the psychology or behaviour of individuals. The question that follows then is not "What forms an agent of change"? but something like "How do we allow for collective change" and the answer is by aiming to understand the nature of the collective and the forces it has on individuals, their goals, their behaviours and so on, so as to tackle the problem at its root rather than focus on the branches.
And you can't even make of sense of the notion of individualism without recourse to its relationship to the social and its emergence in certain types of societies nor can you make sense of any particular individual nor can any individual even make sense of himself except in terms of relations to external and internalised social structures without which he/she couldn't possibly function and which then create categories that only too make sense in context: sane/insane, acceptable/unacceptable, successful/unsuccessful, honour/dishonour and so on. So you need to look out. You'll always to some extent be in a hall of mirrors but at least you can realize that's where you are or you haven't even got to step one. Look in to an individual and all you'll see is shit as Zizek would put it, some of which will inevitably be shit you put there, historians put there, speculation, excuses, stories. Shit basically in terms of understanding. Look instead at actions in context, and at each layer of context right up to the macro-social layer and its own meta-social context.
Anyway, I suppose the inspiration for this discussion, and a decent example of the point, were the recent discussions about sexual discrimination, particularly the one @Sapientia started. Some of us may have approached this in the wrong way by pointing out the bad behaviour of individuals and working our way out from there. Then you get bogged down in arguments about what constitutes bad behaviour, what were the intentions of the protagonists and so on. But if you look at the macro social level and ask yourselves what social forces have led to the creation of workplaces like these and should those forces be reinforced or weakened, the answer seems clearer. I don't want to re-run that argument but zooming out is often a good way to make sense of your moral instincts without needing to get involved in micro moral issues many of which can turn out to be irrelevant.
It occurs to me too by the way that your constant refrain with regard to Trump is that he is a product of his society, a society that must change, and rather than focus on his failings you tend to focus on and criticize the forces that shaped him. Why then take the opposite tack here?
That's not an interesting perspective for me, since I look and see that historical change is made by the individual, not by the collective (unless again, the collective is used by the individual as a tool for change). If I don't like the society I live in, or my social conditions, it's up to me to change them. There's no one else who can change them for me.
And for that matter, why should I (or anyone else) even be interested in "collective" change?
Quoting Baden
I don't see this at all being like this. Rather some individual says "I enjoy sexually teasing women, so I want to look for a workplace where this is acceptable - and if no such workplace exists, then I will make one". So the evil does, in fact, come from the individual, and not from the social structure. Sure, this individual lives in a society. So what? He wants to live as his heart desires in that society - if his heart desires that he lives like Nero in debauchery, etc. that's what he will try to do. The social structure will maybe restrict that. But his heart's desire will not change. The moment he gets an opportunity, he will act. So it just ends up being hypocrisy, just changing social structure.
Quoting Baden
I criticise the hypocrisy of the media and Hollywood who point the finger at Trump, even though they are that which actually spreads this worldview. Now, I have not seen evidence that Trump is a super-effeminate guy like say, Silvio Berlusconi. So I can just assume that he wants to portray the macho-guy appearance because he's been taught that it's cool, and that's how alpha males behave. His desire is to be admired, not to have as much sex as possible. So having sex for him is part of being admired. In his case, I tend to think that it's something that he ended up doing out of a failure of character and the society he lives in.
But with regards to someone like Silvio Berlusconi, in that case, I think he's not doing it because of his society, but rather that he actually enjoys having sex with as many women as possible, and is willing to bend social structures to fulfil that wish, even if it ends up humiliating him.
So evil can flow both from society to individual and from individual to society, but its place of origin is always the individual's heart. The individual has to assent to that evil.
Really good response- you laid out the reasoning succinctly. Nothing is isolated from its social context being that we are raised in and enculturated in a society. Thus, problems may need to be approached from the standpoint of the structural and macro perspective.
What of the idea though that, even if personalities are shaped by their environment, personalities can clash in major ways which may impact the macro. In other words, perhaps the micro affects the macro in just as powerful a force. I am just providing other perspectives here.
I don't like all this talk about authenticity vs faux authenticity any more than Street really because it's itself corrupted by a kind of romanticized individualism in my view but then I don't really like unqualified talk of our relationship to society either when the "individual" is society's term for the essentially micro-social. What is an individual but society expressing itself at the most micro-level? It's not that there's no society only individuals as Thatcher said but in some sense there are no individuals only society (at different levels) making the myth of the romantic individual vs society even more pernicious. It's not just that the individual has no hope against society, it's that that "individual" does not even exist as an "individual". At best within individuals dominated by the socialized aspect there is that which rebels against a particular form of socialization projected outwards. Maybe there in the darkness there's the possibility of a glitter of "authenticity" but all it really aspires to is the remaking of the social only at a more coherent level with respect to the "individual". It's almost like we are aiming for our own demise in the perfect society that consumes us with our consent precisely when we see ourselves most at odds with a particular social milieu.
I wouldn't disagree. But it's a case then of viewing that in context too. Is the conflict one that really threatens or ultimately reinforces social structures? Favours some over others? Moves a society in a predictable direction or destroys it? What types of societies are prone to such conflicts? What does this say about their stability? Can we make predictions based on such interactions between the micro and macro to help us with future social planning? The avoidance of catastrophe? And so on. From a critical perspective, the goal is always to improve things at a social level. At least that's the way I describe it as the minute Marxism or anything with even a shade of it is mentioned there are certain elements that will cover their ears and run away screaming. ;)
If it were a startlingly new perspective, one might uncritically applaud the goal, but the amoral sociological perspective is the spectacles 'we' have been using for a hundred years now, and arguably is the source of just the manipulative, pacifying consumerism, the monopoly of power relations, the dehumanisation, that is being critiqued.
All our preferences to be "free" are ones that we gathered in our setting- the hall of mirrors. All our longings and goals are ones that are provided in our social context. There is no real individual, pure and Platonic waiting "there". Rather, it is constructed from the outside in, which flows back out. Though there is no way of getting a "pure" individualistic stance or character (as it is constructed at least partly in a socially constructed manner along with contingent experiences of the person encountering circumstances of the world), there can be a sort of "stance" in response to society and how its relations are putting pressures on you as an individual. So the issue is then to understand what goals and priorities we want from society at large and whether society is providing the avenues to obtain these goals. So what are the goals we are looking for society to do? I say, the fact that there are any goals that we perceive humans should be following are quite arbitrary, as there is no objective answer. What makes the human project necessary or even preferred as something that needs to get done?
I'm going to venture to guess most people are going to assent to the idea that society should be providing the 6 variations of happiness (deduced according to my a priori existential investigations of course ;)). That would be: experiencing achievements, physical pleasures, aesthetic pleasures (including, religion, ideology, and humor, oddly enough), relationships, learning, and immersive (killing time) physical/mental activities. So, I guess if you didn't want to be antinatalist about it, society should be setting these up as our main priorities. If you wanted to add a more interesting spin, then perhaps we should question why these 6 variations of happiness need to be carried out in the first place. That is THE structural question of questions.
You say "arguably" but so far you've only asserted. Give us something more to chew on.
That is basically an underhanded way of saying that there is no free will - how could there be free will if there are no individuals? And how could anyone (including the speaker himself) be responsible for anything? It is refusing to acknowledge the origin of evil in the application of our free will.
The individual is much more obvious than society, he or she is the starting point. It makes no sense to go from the forest to the trees, since it is the trees which make up the forest in the first place. That is actually exactly why people can change society.
You have a habit of reading into comments and OPs whatever it is you happen to want to talk about. That may be convenient for you but it's not going to lead to a productive discussion.
Yes to everything you said! That said, the need to attend 'outwards' to the social doesn't entail a wholesale disregard for belief and intention, but for a more nuanced understanding of how to appreciate the significance of those beliefs and intentions, which I think you'd agree with. Raymond Geuss - who has similarly written on the need for any plausible political philosophy to attend to 'action and the contexts of action' - has written some great stuff on this as well:
"The emphasis on real motivation does not require that one deny that humans have an imaginative life that is important to them, aspirations, ideals they wish to pursue, or even moral views that influence their behaviour ... What it does mean, to put it tautologically, is that these ideals and aspirations influence their behaviour and hence are politically relevant, only to the extent to which they do actually influence behaviour in some way ... A realist can fully admit that products of the human imagination are very important in human life, provided he or she keeps a keen and unwavering eye upon the basic motto Respice finem, meaning in this case not âthe best way to live is to keep your mind on your end: death,â but âDonât look just at what they say, think, believe, but at what they actually do, and what actually happens as a result.â (Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics).
But Geuss also gets at something else that the OP is interested in (and yes, you're right that I brought up the video here as an offshoot to some thoughts re: the sexual harassment thread), which is the critical danger of 'misplacing' the level of analysis when trying to think through social phenomena:
"If I focus your attention in a very intense way on the various different tariffs and pricing schema that doctors or hospitals or drug companies impose for their products and services, and if I become morally outraged by âexcessiveâ costs some drug companies charge, discussing at great length the relative rates of profit in different sectors of the economy, and pressing the moral claims of patients, it is not at all obvious that anything I say may be straightforwardly âfalseâ; after all, who knows what âexcessiveâ means? However, by proceeding in this way I might well focus your attention on narrow issues of âjustâ pricing, turning it away from more pressing issues about the acceptance in some societies of the very existence of a free market for drugs and medical services. One can even argue that the more outraged I become about the excessive price, the more I obscure the underlying issue."
Geuss wrote this long before the recent brouhaha over price gouging in the medical sector in the US, but it'd be an interesting exercise to look at the media coverage about it and see at what level journalists have predominantly tackled the issue (considering the spectacle that was made of and by, say, Martin Shkreli - who milked it like any good capitalist in the game ought to - I suspect the answer is obvious). But otherwise yeah, you've captured the thrust exactly - see a social problem? Zoom out, and out and out - and then in.
He completely misconceives what a social system is.
He is pressing home a view that suggests the the Social System is a causative agent, when in fact it is the sum of all social action from those that comprise it.
If any one needed a Copernican turn it is this guy.
We do not participate IN a social system, but the sum of human agents IS the social system, and as agents we exploit the structures that form about us to express our volition. This is why the Wall-E ships are not credible - the participants are too passive, and seem to act with ultimate knowledge of what they are supposed to do, rather than just try to get by as they WILL.
Ok, an outline...
Ag's individualism is empowering to each individual, whereas the sociological view is disempowering. (non absolutely).
However, the sociological view is empowering to the managerial sector who are in the position to adjust the structures of society. Those with such power will be structurally directed to conserve their own power, and thus the lawyer, the advertiser, the social work supervisor, the planning officer, the editor, will all be manipulating us in the direction of passivity, compliance, subservience to 'the forces of social necessity'. Success over a generation or two results in rage against the machine - the machinations, that is, of sociologists.
Large part of that rage is about the de-moralising of power exactly in terms of the managerial claim to be 'only doing my job'. If the lines of least resistance are in place, any idiot or asshole can be president. How's that working out for you?
Or to put it another way, we are indeed playing monopoly in a society that mandates greed, and with 50% of wealth in the hands of 1% of the players, we are near the end of the game. The game has been consciously arranged that way by people using the sociological view whereby their own actions are excused, and even laudable; they are realists as opposed to idealists - the latter being responsible for all the conflicts.
Quoting Baden
So, exactly where is the hope? Is there an individual or not? And if so, what is it? Is it as I say, moral consciousness, our capacity to reason and transcend this narrow and inescapable micro-social position? But, if you are saying what I think you are saying, then when I say "authentic individual" and the "construct of the individual (i.e. faux)" than essentially you and I are saying the same thing. I agree with @StreetlightX but what I got from his OP was that we cannot escape and that we are nothing more than an 'incentive structure' or empiricist in a way that we are our sensory experiences that led to what frightened me in his thinking: if this is the case, what type of society can we frame or create that works to the greatest benefit of the system (a type of system against the system), like using ideology itself against itself, the same 'faux' construct but just another version of it.
What happens to rationalism then? Are we never able to access the tools we have in the mind to learn and escape the apparent inescapable?
I'm not sure. Anyone can become wealthy and influential if that's what they want, provided that they have access to basic education and good health. It's easier than ever today to provide value for others at a large scale and to access the knowledge you need (although misinformation seems to be growing a lot faster than the correct information). So why does it matter if 50% of the wealth is owned by 1%? That doesn't prevent me or anyone else from acquiring wealth if that's what we're seeking. Someone else being rich does not in any way affect me.
But again, the problem is that people keep pointing fingers at others, instead of focusing on what THEY can do to change their circumstances. It's always the other - it's because the 1% own 50% of the wealth that I am poor and my life sucks. That's how they think. Instead, they should realise that the 1% owning 50% of the wealth does not stop them at all from selling to others and becoming rich themselves.
You're speaking as though playing monopoly. What if there's a different game. A sustainable and more meaningful game.
No I'm not. In the real world, it's not money that matters, it's how useful you are to the rest of the world. If you are really really useful, then you will pretty much be rich. It's hard not to be in a capitalist world.
As for games. Different games are still games, so...
What do you mean by useful? Playing monopoly well is useful in the sense that it keeps the game going. Also useful in that it's the path of least resistance.
In the monopoly game you don't have to do anything useful to make money. In this world, in order to get you to flip out that fat wallet of yours and hand me part of your money I need to give you something good in exchange.
I might want to add a few more provisos, but suppose someone doesn't want to become wealthy and influential, suppose they want to teach, or nurse, or something. I don't think that means that they want to be poor and despised.
Ok, but then they need to make sure they can influence and help a large number of people. There's teaching and there's teaching. Going to a state college or school to teach wouldn't be a way to maximise your reach, nor your wealth for that matter. If you don't really work to make a difference for a lot of people, chances are you may struggle financially. You're better off combining regular teaching with other forms of less traditional teaching, such as what Jordan Peterson does. He makes $70K+/month just from Patreon donations right now.
If your goal is to nurse, ideally you won't be satisfied just with your own efforts, but would want to start a larger movement, again that requires capital, etc.
You haven't explained exactly what you mean by useful. I suggest there can be a big difference between 'useful' and 'meaningful'.
No. I don't want to start a movement, not everyone does, I don't need capital etc. I don't want to play monopoly, or empires, I want to play happy families.
Because of things like memory, writing, and the development of new systems within the larger social system(e.g., political parties), the greater social system has inertia and in this way expresses a will of its own. The cells in my eyes move with my body despite them having nothing to do with propelling my legs.
Useful is something that others find valuable.
Quoting unenlightened
Right, but without capital and empires you cannot spread your work to as many people as possible. You are limited to only helping a very minor group...
I'm not interested in money for its own sake, but in capitalism you must play empires in order to create changes in the larger society.
That's what I'm getting at. The change I want to make is to create a way of interacting that is not building empires You say I must play empires to stop playing empires, and I don't believe you.
Impossible unenlightened... don't be naive. If you refuse to play empires, then those who do play empires can always sidetrack your efforts and your work. It's how a capitalist world works. So even if you want to stop playing empires you must play empires.
Your eyes and legs analogy does not work in the slightest.
So for instance someone might purchase a work of art as a useful investment and not because they like the art, valuing capital more than art.
Imagine a world where aesthetic values are greater than materialistic values. Perhaps a nice alternative to the game of monopoly.
A falling rock doesn't have volition either, but it can certainly act upon you by crushing in your skull.
Yes, I would, there's a certain alchemy of perspective involved.
Quoting StreetlightX
How easy it is to fall in to the trap of impotent moral outrage. Yep.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, even critiquing capitalism in terms of rising drug prices doesn't get you far enough, zoom out again and you get the horrors of the Congo and so on, where characters like Martin Shkreli would be relatively angelic.
Quoting unenlightened
I don't accept that from the get-go. We're talking about what an effective sociological critique is. There's hardly anything less empowering than a poor argumentative strategy, or blowing your emotions on moral outrage at individuals when you could be identifying and discovering ways to disempower them through an analysis of what gives life to their bad behaviour. The recent exemplar is the sexual discrimination/harassment discussions. What were the most effective arguments there? Ans: Those that zoomed out and put things in socio-historical context in my view.
Quoting unenlightened
But that should be an argument for individuals taking advantage of the very same tools to fight back. They're armed so why shouldn't we be? Again, I see us as talking about what constitutes an effective analysis and you seem to be conceding the point but complaining that the tool is in the wrong hands. So, should we now shout and complain how bad advertisers and managers and so on are for feathering their own nests at the expense of us homeless hatchlings or should we figure out how to fly as well as them and dump their eggs on the ground.
So, the question as I see it and as I've said is:
"How do we most successfully approach a critical analysis of social problems?" and the thesis is that we look out at the social milieu not in to the psychology or behaviour of individuals. The question that follows then is not "What forms an agent of change"? but something like "How do we allow for collective change" and the answer is by aiming to understand the nature of the collective and the forces it has on individuals, their goals, their behaviours and so on, so as to tackle the problem at its root rather than focus on the branches."
So, you've identified a problem, a wealth gap. How do we solve it? By complaining about how mean and immoral the rich are? Or by looking at how they get away with it and fighting back at the structures and ideologies that sometimes not-so-obviously enable them such as the incessant glorification of entertainment and choice, which leads us to want to be more like them (and resent it when we're not) and ends up creating more "successful" thems and more "failing" anti-thems with the accepted criteria of "success" and "failure" remaining solidly in place.
So, you don't ignore individual persons any more than you ignore individual sentences in a book, and some sentences are more important then others, but you still need to read the book and compare it to other books and think about the nature of books and so on. (And I don't think your view is much like Agu's by the way. Agu is all for Individualism with a capitalist "I", the pursuit of wealth and power, glorifying the emperor and pretending to the throne, as his posts here, most of which don't seem very relevant to me, have shown.)
Also, you can only have the individual vs. society, the individual changing society, to the extent that there are gaps in that society that allow that to happen. Most societies that have existed have remained the same over millennia. Now we've got societies that are capable of fairly rapid change not simply because of particular individuals but because they are the type of societies which contain with themselves the seeds of their own development. Another reason to zoom out.
I'm with you up to a point. But rather than aim for specifics, which are always very culture laden, I tend to take the more general view that society should facilitate as much variation as possible as much creativity and change as possible while still maintaining itself, i.e. not collapsing into anarchy; in other words take full advantage of its resources, express the full potential of its patterns, the set of relationships that make it up in a sustainable way. As it grows and develops in this way, we cannot but grow too (which emphasises again the point, that to set one against society in the abstract - if not against a particular form of society - is suicide).
Quoting TimeLine
But hope is the opiate of the masses, no? ;). In circumscribing expectations, in delimiting our scope, there is still the potential for willing change. And the very will to attack a problem in that way signals there is always hope, and not just a restless yearning hope, a palliative hope, but a focused empowering hope.
Quoting TimeLine
Well I don't want to go too far with it as it could end up sounding counterproductive, but the metaphor I would use for society and the individual would be of the sea and its waves. The sea, society; we, waves. Most waves are small and travel in the same direction, but some are larger and very occasionally you get a Tsunami that quickly changes the very map of the sea but you don't get waves separate from the sea, floating over it so to speak; no waves without the sea and no way to separate the two. From birth, the process of individualization is the process of socialization. It's no coincidence that the older we get and the more we consider ourselves a developed individual the more socialized we tend to be. The only true individuals (in the sense of being non-socialized) are babies and the insane. That understood, we can go back to talking about individuals while recognizing we carry around this micro-society in our heads and basically are it with no way to escape except through insanity or death. So,what we are talking about when we talk about significant individuals is those that are larger waves - they separate themselves further from the surface and often pull others along with them; we're talking about people who are different in terms of the power they exert, but they're still part of the sea. (Other individuals who are different and exert little power, waves that travel in their own direction don't tend to last long or get forgotten. Are they less individual? Depends how you look at it, but we're all made of basically the same stuff.)
Quoting TimeLine
But what exactly do we want to escape? And why? And is not all this wanting to escape and hoping to escape not just part of the merry-go-round that keeps things just as they are? "I want to escape, I hate it all therefore I've expressed myself as an individual, I've rebelled against the "system", I've done enough". No, I don't think the focus should be negative as if there is no baby in the bathwater or that that it is even possible anyway to escape given that escape from society in general (if not a particular society) is death or insanity. I think it's more about vision and imagination at the personal and social levels. Not "I want to escape out of society" but "I want to create into a specific form of society".
However - and this point doesn't seem to have been addressed by anyone - the larger point is that those the shape of those interactions themselves are molded by socital incentive structures. Or as I said in the OP, this is the rough system of rewards, punishments, pleasures, accolades and disincentives that permeate it. In the terms of system dynamics, incentive structures can be thought of as attactors in a system, where attractors are points towards which trajectories tend towards (without being 'determined' by them). The presence of a Lorenz attactor in a system, for instance, will result (roughly) in the ossilation of a value around two points:
Society can be thought of as precisely a system permeated by an enormous range and distribution of such attractors: factors of "push and pull" which structure the individual trajectories of the elements that compose it. Note that the 'elements' here don't necessarily have to be individual people: in fact I think they'd be better thought of in terms of flows (of migrants, of money, of food distribution, of access to education and employment, etc). The politics of migrants, now so prevalent in the Western discourse, is nothing but the politics of flows. It is literally impossible to see 'the migrant problem' as one of individuals in abstrcto.
Another important caveat is that attractors in society also act differentially: not everyone or everything will respond in the same way to the same pressures and incentives: individuals too are composed of their own set of attractors and thresholds which determine what they can and do respond to. And lastly, the incentive structure of society is not something that is 'set' or unalterable. One of the virtues of thinking of society in this way is that it's very dynamism also means that such incentive structures can be changed or modified: society is plastic. 'Politics' can be thought of as the field which most deliberately aims to modify exactly those structures (and the 'players' can be companies, institutions, people, governments, etc).
No wonder the philosophy of individualism is either madness or infantilism...
In the fictional, simplistic, and exaggerated world of Wall-E, social systems are depicted which have obvious direct and indirect impacts on individuals, to the point that the population has become totally homogeneous as their lives are utterly dictated by the system they inhabit. Broadly, the video thrusts the idea that it's all nurture and portrays even speaking about nature as despicable and un-virtuous. Reality is complex and messy though; "nature" along with many confounding circumstantial factors create too many complicated interactions for even our best models. For example, suggesting that we laugh at sexist jokes (or are ourselves conditioned to be sexist) because that's the path of least resistance says nothing about how or why it is actually the path of least resistance and doesn't address the complex psychological and biological components of what causes humans to laugh in the first place or the social forces which cause us to become sexist in the first place (let alone demonstrate that we are in fact living in a sexist society). Similarly, taking economic and other disparities between races or genders as direct evidence of patriarchy and white supremacy (paths of least resistance and incentive structures which harm women and non-whites) doesn't actually describe how these systems work to achieve this or how we can dismantle them. It's alluded that we're conditioned and incentivized, but we're never given coherent explanations of how the conditioning actually happens or how and which incentive structures produce negative results and how to correct them.
This is the same kind of rationale that suggests playing violent video games conditions you to become a violent person, or that provocative depictions of women conditions you to be sexist against women or "treat them like objects". Literally everything can be portrayed as racist or sexist using this most greasy logical incline. On the surface and in the abstract it makes sense, but the real world is just to messy for this approach to yield usable results. This is the same slippery slope that produced the concept of "micro-aggressions" out of a desperate search for a mechanistic explanation of how social systems enforce statistical disparity between demographics.
The majority of the video was just a synopsis of "Wall-E" and the ad-nauseam explanation of the concept of social systems which I don't object to (those parts were informative and entertaining) but I do object to it's complete rejection of nature and individuals/individual variation having anything to do with answering the question "why is society the way it is?". I also object to it's casual insistence that we're living in a white supremacist patriarchy; the video alludes to conditioning, incentive structures, and paths of least resistance as evidence but they're never elucidated on or actually explained (because the subjects are too complex to actually do so).
One thing that ought to be questioned is the very desirability of 'escape': if our attachment to society is the very condition of our individuality (and, as Baden said, the very condition of self-intelligibility (contra Cartesian atomism)) , it's not too far a stretch to think that the desire to 'escape' is not unlike the desire of Kant's dove, for which "cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.â I've been reading the work of the Invisible Committee recently, and they put this in stark and beautiful terms:
"What am I," then? Since childhood, I've been involved with flows of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.
... The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them ... The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can't rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied." (The invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection).
Freedom is not somehow opposed to the social; the social is freedom's sine qua non. Further reading: Hannah Arendt, What Is Freedom? [pdf].
But one can argue, our current society is doing this. "Facilitate as much variation as possible as much creativity and change while maintaining itself" seems to be the Western mode for the last couple centuries. So there can certainly be tweaking and such, but by-and-large, your goals for society are rather conservative. One can argue, the structures are already in place for what you ask. Capitalism provides for the incentives for economic creativity. Universities, government, and non-profits provide the incentives for academic creativity. Bars, social clubs, sports, literature, arts, electronics (which is perhaps too dominant), hobbies, etc. provide for entertainment creativity. Except for micro-changes to certain decision-makers (e.g. politicians, economic or social policy changes), your vision there is pretty much fulfilled. Now, if you look at my 6 variations of happiness, you can try to use that as a backdrop to how well current society is measuring up to a standard. Are we actually forming the best relationships we can and is it being realized for the most people? Are we allowing for the best ways to feel achievement and is it being realized for the most people? Are we allowing for the promotion of aesthetic experiences and is it being realized for the most people? Are allowing for immersive mental/physical activities (or flow activities) and is it being realized for most people? Are we allowing for physical pleasures and is it being realized by most people? Are we allowing for learning and promoting curiosity and is it being realized for most people? Well, if the answer is mediocre to not really, then perhaps society isn't measuring up to basic principles of happiness.
Now, to take the flipside. Perhaps life is more like the structural suffering I often describe. It is more about the temporary sensation of completion which tends to then give way to yet more desires and wants that are neverending, hard to satisfy, and are instrumental in the sense that, there is no final completion. We do to do to do to do. We are burdened with maintaining our bodies, and entertaining our minds, thus putting more energy into the system and generally running about on the stage of the world. Why does this have to take place? What are we trying to achieve here?
No difference. They still value the piece of art for one reason or another.
I never said that, Baden did, I actually just quoted him. That's why there are quote marks around it, you know...
They certainly have a way to hit you where it hurts :
"There is no âenvironmental catastrophe.â The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is whatâs left to man after heâs lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshopâthey donât have an âenvironment;â they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, moments of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all of these places. Itâs only us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hourâthe ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, and watch for an echo of the world on televisionâonly we get to have an environment. And thereâs no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change of scenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia."
Yes, I did say that and I did qualify afterwards what I meant too.
Am I not articulating myself correctly? I am speaking of self-reflective determination within this said-system. I understand what you are saying, but what I am having trouble with is what this 'individualisation' actually is and whether we have the cognitive tools - i.e. reason - that renders us capable through consciousness to transcend the conditioning or determinative role that makes us imitate this 'individual' as an identification process to our social environment. I am not talking about being non-socialised, I am talking about transcending it and being capable of recognising the psychosocial processes and whether our opinions are formed by learned conditioning through the continuous interaction or immersion into environmental and social influences, simulating prominent role models that become ones self-regulatory mechanism and behavioural pattern. Is everything we are merely sensory experience?
The construction of an 'individualâ is nothing more than an adaptation to an external system that we unconsciously internalise that becomes the same system for our self-regulatory processes; our will, values and belief-systems and any changes to this system vis-a-vis new experiences merely alter that brings me to the concern of whether we are cognitively capable of self-reflective determination or are we just a system mimicking another system. I do not think that the sea/waves is a solid example of what I am attempting to convey; the attachment is still there, but with the capacity to detach should we so choose. Are we enabled with the cognitive tools that would allow us to transcend learned social behaviour and become 'self-aware' and empathetic, or is what you refer to as empathy or morality just a shallow system of social imitation?
Why does that need to be questioned? I perhaps take a more Rousseau approach and see the system as the primary issue or problem that restricts our cognitive capacity to naturally evolve, that latter being that we have the tools but we are just not made aware of how to use it because of society (like in Wall-e); those with pathological disorders that have attachment issues fail to 'cut the umbilical cord'.
Then we disagree irreconcilably unfortunately :(
You have been careful to support my statement, by pretending to refute it. The two way street that lies between the concepts of the individual and society is not well expressed by the video in the op, yet you do attempt to bring it into sharper focus. In this you give undue credit to the maker of the video, who in fact promotes the same myth that the establishment does. And that is, that social ills can be expressed which fly against individual need. There is not animmigrant problem. There are migrants with agency that the structures build by the establishment are all but powerless to resist. The result is that they invent a myth that lies outside the norm; 'Immigrant problem"; "drugs problem' and so on. In failing to see this for what it is, the maker of the video is in collusion with the establishment by pretending to have found a problem which is defined in "objective" ways.
In this way individual needs are set outside the core structure (those that comprise the ideal social unit). In this way these individuals can be more easily vilified, and the core preserved.
This might seem a reasonable view until, almost unnoticed, the Jews, the blacks, the hispanics, those deemed to be 'abusing' drugs, the irreligious start to go missing and are taken off the streets.
In pretending that 'society' and its units are clearly distinct objects of desire, the agents who actually comprise those structures can be set aside.
In short you and your video are making a political statement of intent. A statement that in essence is counter to personal freedom and in denial of the importance of agency over structure. In truth all you are saying is that we all have equal amounts of agency, but some have more agency than others, and they are those in control of the moral, political, financial and social powers.
On the other hand you might more reasonably promote a discourse which tells the truth about the simply fact that the existence of agents comes before the essence of society. That society is only and can be only the sum of the actions of social agents - be they in power or in poverty. In this way you would be democratic rather than conservative.
Dude, he literally freeze-frames the line "The dynamic relationship between individuals and social systems is what makes social life happen" in big bold letters. If you missed it, that's on you.
And I legit can't read that wall of text that is the rest of your post.
Please have the decency to read what I am saying, and not just pick out one sentence.
The individuals are society. The statement is an utter tautology. There is no society without them, so it does not exist as and of itself, no more than the "migrant problem" exists unless the establishment decide they do not like migrants. The actors are the existence and the essence of society.
I guess one of my major points is that, what if you want to just pause the whole structural process of surviving and whatnot. You cannot do this without some form of death (eventually). So the structure itself is never good. Once born, you must put forth the energy to maintain in the first place. Why would we want to throw more individuals into this situation? Does the six forms of happiness (or some variation thereof) really worth it? Is that the mission? Is that why individuals must be born to be enculturated into a society, for their own happiness? Do you see how I think this is full of contradictions and circular logic?
Of course there's a difference. Valuing art as an investment expresses a capitalistic value system. Valuing art for aesthetics expresses a different value system, one based more in meaning than capital gain.
Though capitalism might be a fun game to play if you're good at it, it's meaningless and unsustainable. It's not human nature to compete for resources and hoard wealth. We can change our nature to act cooperatively for mutual benefit and live meaningful lives in a sustainable world.
Social behavior must confront the reality of where it finds itself. A city has highways and byways, is set in the middle of a desert or on the mouth of a river, it has a down town an uptown, and an out of town. What people in any city can do is not entirely up to them, there is a large confluence of real structures and junk space, historical facts, and chance occurrences that effect what has and what can be done and thereby what can be thought. Following Rem Koolhaas thoughts and investigations.
Until you address the institution of procreation, everything else is small peanuts ;) .
No, it is more insidious than that. In evolutionary game theory and vanilla game theory, it is assumed that the fittest actors in any game are legitimately (as justified by the term 'rational actors') greedy and selfish. Compassion and altruism, to the best of my knowledge, are still seen as means to a selfish end.
So, you have at one end social structures reinforcing greed and selfish behavior lauded under the guise of noble concepts like 'freedom' and 'individualism', and at the other end, the individual trying to stand out from the crowd but in reality just reinforces the whole game.
One thing that game theory does in an analysis is ascribe an abstract opponent. This can be 'nature' or another player. This can be generalised to cooperative games, where groups of players can form coalitions and solutions (strategies) of the game are ways of allocating resources (payoffs) or costs (losses) to groups. Further, the analysis can include leaving allied groups and making new allied groups. The assumption that self interest generates optimal payoff in general really only applies to games of coalition of size 1; self interest becomes interest of one's coalition if they are pre-allocated (like in Secret Hitler). If coalitions are not pre-allocated, self interest can take the usual optimal payoff for me form (which can include overheads of coalition joining to avoid greater losses), but also the group form if leaving the coalition has opportunity costs close to losing the game (or are sufficiently bad for the player)
Things are crazy complicated when an individual player wins, coalitions aren't disjoint (a person can only be a member of 1 player group) and aren't pre-allocated. Like in the board Game of Thrones or Risk. Things are even more complicated when there are group winning conditions, the conditions aren't monotonic (containing a winning player implies that group wins, like in Secret Hitler), and there are overlapping coalitions. Also each player (or coalition) can possibly make multiple moves at once, has incomplete information on allies and enemies, and can make at least one of infinitely many moves (think about adjusting a tax rate)... The latter of which begins to resemble real life more than Fuck You Buddy.
It's worthwhile to remember that the development of game theory was principally done at the RAND corporation (name is significant) during the Cold War, which developed 'the delicate balance of terror' and mutually assured destruction as a Nash Equilibrium to prevent nuclear holocaust in the Cold War. The historical context for its first developments are the paranoid spying and technocratic policy planning of the Cold War, so it isn't surprising that the subject which plays games in the old game theory is self interested, isolated and amoral.
The idea of applying game theory to large social structures seamlessly is pretty bad - the kind of games that begin to approach the complexity of real world diplomacy are analytically intractable, mathematician speak for 'this can't be solved exactly, only approximately', and so resist pithy formulation to evince claims in essays. A rule of thumb when someone justifies something using game theory is to look at the assumptions for the game and see how distorted the vision of politico-economic life it requires. That said, the numerical analysis of games to inform policy decisions lends itself very well to technocratic powers attempting to keep things as they are, like the aforementioned US think tank, but it's also present in the UK under the guise of neoliberal public choice theory.
Yeah, but expected utility for an individual participant or a group of collectively cooperating participants is still defined as optimal if self-interest is maximized through decision making by anyone or group of individuals.
Quoting fdrake
Game theory would postulate that common characteristics such as sympathy and such are irrational if participants stand to have a better payoff if the other group is more fit, and again fitness is defined as pursuing or maximizing utility by selfish behavior. But, fortunately, in reality, people aren't that rational.
Quoting fdrake
If they are preallocated is a big 'if'. Rarely are things so clear or obvious in the real world, which you bring up later in your post. Which, leads me to believe that acting selfishly will almost always be what is best for the individual and group of individuals (Is there a theorem for that? I think the Nash Equilibrium only holds given that premise, otherwise the game falls apart, I think.). This isn't even starting to mention the asymmetric information problem. But, what I gathered from my short stint at one course of game theory at college, is that even when asymmetric information problems are avoided by having a game of guaranteed rewards or more formalized conditions (the market) is that utility is maximized even more by self-interested behavior. This is again because, at the very fundamental level, self-interested behavior is rational and ought to be done. So, the system is constantly self-reinforcing.
When you say 'is there a theorem for that' it has to be specific to a game or class of games. There's not 'theorem for that' for games which display most of the features of political/economic discourse or activity. There isn't even a guarantee for Nash equilibrium in this kind of context.
Trying to model 'the market' in terms of game theory is not usually done in a manner that represents the complexities of the market. If someone agrees that the Black-Scholes equation is useful - or more generally continuous time modelling of financial time series - this is no longer representable as a game with a finite number of actions without losing information. Fluctuations of the market in continuous time are generated per unit time through the activities of humans.
In a tautologous sense, you can define self-interest as maximising your utility function. But to say that this necessarily contains all the features of 'rational self interest' in something close to the Randian or non-empirical economic models sense for all games just isn't true. Secret Hitler makes people behave collegially since they share winning conditions for the group and they cannot defect. The interest of the individual is equivalent to the interest of their group here.
The subject is constrained by the rules of the game they are depicted in. This entails that the sense of game-theoretic rationality for Secret Hitler has the exact same kind of justification to be the 'primordial sense of self interest' that any (most, really) other game theoretic conception of human activity, including the rational-self-interest Bayesian-dutch-book super capitalist investor-God. It's only the pop-cultural amalgamation of the old Cold War game theory + the neoliberal economic subject that makes us believe the subject in their use of games is more primordial or even more representative of human subjectivity than someone playing Secret Hitler.
I was under the impression that game theory is based on mathematics, so, eventually (given a sufficiently complex calculus) all games could be modeled to understand what actions would produce the maximum amount of utility to all participants. Since you seem to know more about this than I do, then I figure you must be right in highlighting the complexity of various games and imposed constraints on participants. But, again it seems that the underlying premise to render such a conclusion as sound would be that every participant is acting in their own or collective self-interest, no?
Quoting fdrake
Yes, I understand that modeling a situation often requires more than the 2D analysis we're talking about, or rather 3D analysis bounded by time; but, as I understand it, there are no hard limits imposed by any situation that wouldn't allow a sufficiently complex calculus to be devised to account for all externalities arising from interactions in the market.
Quoting fdrake
What makes you say that? Again, is there a hard limit imposed by a theorem or such that would prohibit said modeling to occur?
Acting in someone's self interest isn't actually a clear thing game theoretically unless strategies can be discussed. To 'act in your self interest' is to make a move or sequence of moves which increase your utility. IE, you need to be able to evaluate the utility quantitatively to speak clearly in this sense. This is why it works for simple games better than complex ones.
There's a big difference between 'collective self interest' and 'self interest', if you read the wiki-page on cooperative game theory, you can see that self interest is simply the interest of what counts as a player. There's not necessarily a sense of subjectivity implicit in the game, even. You can consider estimating a line of best fit a game where nature tries to give you the worst possible data for the estimate and you need to make the best possible guess (given a loss or utility function).
Games typically have finite numbers of moves, prices of stuff in the market are determined by buying and selling games, time is continuous in financial time series models, therefore there are infinitely many moves made. If you require a calculus that can be written down and computed by hand, that doesn't always exist for Bayesian Games. It could be done with numerical approximation though. Hard limits on the situation correspond to constraints imposed by the game theoretic model which do not actually obtain in a relevant manner. Such as the symmetry of gains and losses of actions which is typically assumed, and the role that the negation of that assumption plays in prospect theory.
Well, self interest can mean the interest of everyone in the game, you, the self interest of nature... And what self interest means game theoretically only makes sense in terms of calculable payoffs and costs. Finding a 'utility function' for life in general is doubtlessly impossible.
Yeah, but that really doesn't answer the question as to whether in principle it is possible to model game theoretic situations to produce the optimal outcome for either all participants or a sole participant by a sufficiently complex calculus or even AI, in the future.
Regardless of that, it seems that the whole issue is marred by what counts as 'rational behavior' and if humans can ever be consistent in that behavior in a multitude of situations.
I don't think it's feasible to keep believing in the universality of economic rationality when there are plenty of scenarios which don't contain it. We can play a game that doesn't contain it if you like.
You are now called Toby, Toby has chronic fatigue syndrome. The rules of the game are as follows:
(1) A move is whether you decide to go to work on a given day.
(2) If you become too tired, you will have to spend some time out of work to recover. Becoming too tired is a function of the hours worked within a time period.
(3) If you don't work enough, you will be fired.
(4) You lose when you are fired or when you become very ill from working too much.
This is an incomplete information game in two senses, you don't know the rules fully - only enough to make moves, you don't know the probability distribution of outcomes, you don't know the utility function or expected loss of your moves.
Make a move, and I'll tell you whether its expected value with the hidden utility is positive, negative or 0.
To make it easier, if you give me a sequence of 10 moves, I'll tell you whether it's losing or not. EG: denote by W a day that you work and N a day that you don't, you could give me a string like WWWNWWWN, and I'd tell you whether it's losing or not.