Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Over at lefttoright, one of the few blogs that links to this one,
Elizabeth Anderson has an interesting post discussing Hayek and Rawls and Nozick and game theory, called, so you want to live in a free society.
My comment:
Posted by: arbitrary aardvark
I want to complement EA on this post. It is an example of what this blog was to be about - constructive discussion between the left and the right.
It speaks to us in our language - Hayek, Nozick, Monopoly. It avoids obvious fallacies like strawpersons or assuming the conclusion. I'm not sure where she's headed; I'm suspicious, based on her earlier series of posts that didn't do justice to Hayek, but I'm open to seeing where this goes.
Rawls explored his theory of justice by positing a veil of ignorance, and asking what rules we would want to choose before playing the game of life.
EA is doing something similar here, by the analogy with Monopoly and Life.
Games are simulations. She can ask, for those of us who are pretty confident about our Theories of Justice, that we express it as a set of rules for a game.
Then we can run the game a few hundred times, and evaluate how we feel about the outcomes.
Then we bicker about whether the game didn't map the theory well enough...
still, it's a useful way of exploring these ideas.
Monopoly, of course, was invented by a Georgist single-tax philosopher in order to show how land rents create and leverage social inequality. So the idea of games as philosophical tools isn't new, but the ability to do computer based analysis of the results has come a long way, and that there are games like Life and Monopoly and Global Thermonuclear War that we are familar with as a shared cultural heritage, makes this a useful way to look at things.
So where do we go in part II?
Posted by: arbitrary aardvark | June 1, 2005 12:28 AM | Permalink
It was just what I was looking for; some give and take at the level of abstract theory, rather than say doing the laundry and cleaning the car and doing the shopping. (I need coffee and shampoo from the nearby store that's closed for the night.)
Elizabeth Anderson has an interesting post discussing Hayek and Rawls and Nozick and game theory, called, so you want to live in a free society.
My comment:
Posted by: arbitrary aardvark
I want to complement EA on this post. It is an example of what this blog was to be about - constructive discussion between the left and the right.
It speaks to us in our language - Hayek, Nozick, Monopoly. It avoids obvious fallacies like strawpersons or assuming the conclusion. I'm not sure where she's headed; I'm suspicious, based on her earlier series of posts that didn't do justice to Hayek, but I'm open to seeing where this goes.
Rawls explored his theory of justice by positing a veil of ignorance, and asking what rules we would want to choose before playing the game of life.
EA is doing something similar here, by the analogy with Monopoly and Life.
Games are simulations. She can ask, for those of us who are pretty confident about our Theories of Justice, that we express it as a set of rules for a game.
Then we can run the game a few hundred times, and evaluate how we feel about the outcomes.
Then we bicker about whether the game didn't map the theory well enough...
still, it's a useful way of exploring these ideas.
Monopoly, of course, was invented by a Georgist single-tax philosopher in order to show how land rents create and leverage social inequality. So the idea of games as philosophical tools isn't new, but the ability to do computer based analysis of the results has come a long way, and that there are games like Life and Monopoly and Global Thermonuclear War that we are familar with as a shared cultural heritage, makes this a useful way to look at things.
So where do we go in part II?
Posted by: arbitrary aardvark | June 1, 2005 12:28 AM | Permalink
It was just what I was looking for; some give and take at the level of abstract theory, rather than say doing the laundry and cleaning the car and doing the shopping. (I need coffee and shampoo from the nearby store that's closed for the night.)
Comments:
Post a Comment
