Sports writer kills himself, leaves behind website describing how and why

Tanoomba_sl said:

"Same shit, different day?" According to Lithose, we are less barbaric than we've ever been before. We've been consistently ascending the ladder of civility and acting in ways that benefit mankind. All I'm saying is we're ready for the next step. All you're saying is "That's just the way things are."

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Tan. Have you ever stopped to think about this possibility: That Capitalism is a system which increases production based upon exploiting negative human qualities, such as greed and self interest. And it'sbecauseCapitalism exploits these qualities rather than suppress them, which previous systems used violence to do (For the lower classes), that we have greater production. And because we have greater production, there is less scarcity, and we are less prone to barbarity. Think about it, for a moment, in previous systems--every time greed/self interest wasnotsuppressedthrough the threat of violence, say, among the aristocracy, it ended up spiraling out of control. Capitalism doesn't attempt to suppress it, it attempts toharnessit, for all social classes (And no, it doesn't always work, but it works BETTER than anything previously--I could also write about how it works "better" for X class and how the elite exploit it, but this is a short, rough overview).

In other words, it's just as possible to say people are as shitty as ever, but the systems we have in place are better at spinning that shit into gold, as it is to say that people have gotten progressively more moral and ethical. If you look at any society that attempted to take these systems out, systems that direct greed and self interest into production, then you'll see it almost always devolves into another form of power collection that is overall far more reliant on violence for it's control and far less effective at spurring production (Even if innovation remains nominal).

The fact is, YOU are not smart enough to know whether your truth, or the above truth is correct. Neither am I. No one is. Some people have made some very educated guesses at it and that's why you see a lot of divergence in political-economic thought. But the fact remains, one system has proven to actually work, and increase most of the quality of life assessments we can measure--and that's Capitalism. You say there is a "next step", and I really hope there is, I really do, but there is very little evidence of it. The only thing we can point to, right now, is the success of more social elements in some Capitalist societies. Which leads me to believe there might be a next step, that maybe Marx was right, but his time scale was off by about 300 years.

I, personally, don't think humanity will make it to the next step until we achieve true post scarcity. And that's going to require fully mechanized labor, far more advanced resource synthesis techniques or some kind of singularity so we can have robot bodies. Until then? I do not, absolutely in no way, see a future built on the precepts that Marx thought existed below the greed/desire that Capitalism supposedly instills--I think that greed/desire is just there, and Capitalism simply utilizes it for production. And yeah, Capitalism might amplify them--but again, when we tried to suppress them? It didn't work out well (Historically or in modernity).

Attacking his degree is kind of silly, it isn't like he is putting himself out there as an authority based on his teaching. Am I not allowed to talk about this stuff either?

Also, in case I am not allowed to talk about this subject unless I can link it to a field closer to mine,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_function

A fitness function is a particular type of objective function that is used to summarise, as a single figure of merit, how close a given design solution is to achieving the set aims.
In particular, in the fields of genetic programming and genetic algorithms, each design solution is represented as a string of numbers (referred to as a chromosome). After each round of testing, or simulation, the idea is to delete the 'n' worst design solutions, and to breed 'n' new ones from the best design solutions. Each design solution, therefore, needs to be awarded a figure of merit, to indicate how close it came to meeting the overall specification, and this is generated by applying the fitness function to the test, or simulation, results obtained from that solution.

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It's especially ironic coming from the guy who was saying "I shouldn't have to read Marx to comment on it"