Let me be clear that I don't give a single fuck about the good of Society as such. Society only matters to me because people live in it.
@StevenBrust It's like, are you concerned about the health of your liver, or the health of the individual cells in your liver?
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@StevenBrust It's natural to be concerned about the former. Which is why I find it necessary to reject that viewpoint explicitly in this. -
@chaosprime We may need to save this for in-person, because I'm still not getting it. -
@StevenBrust Maybe? The point is that focusing on the large-scale abstraction can lead to failures in handling the small-scale abstraction. -
@StevenBrust We've seen plenty of people earnestly trying to make the big system work and being happy to see it roll over the small systems. -
@chaosprime I would argue that in those cases the failure with the small systems points out a flaw in understanding the large system. -
@StevenBrust It does. And sometimes those flaws arise because the large system regarded as a whole is regarded as the only important thing. -
@chaosprime As long as that is the case, efforts to fix systems--big or small--can have, at the most, cosmetic effects. -
@StevenBrust Well, I mean, efforts to fix systems big and small can easily murder people. So that's not what I'd call cosmetic. - 1 more reply
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