Comment by sunshowers
15 days ago
> They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
This conundrum, like so many others in public discourse, is downstream of the widespread but fundamentally incorrect belief in free will (which in turn is downstream of belief in supernatural powers, because free will sure as hell isn't explained by anything in nature).
Nothing is in anyone's control. There's no such thing as "eyes wide open". People's behaviors are 100% downstream of genetics and environment. Some people behave rationally some of the time, and to the extent they do so it is because the environment set them up to do that. There is absolutely no coherent reason to generalize that into the idea that most people vote (or do anything else) rationally.
You shoe-horned two things together - free will and rationality.
Just because free will doesn't exist, doesn't mean they didn't act "rationally" (whatever that even means in this case).
Deindustrialization and Nikefication in the past several decades isn't "rational" long-term behavior either.
I mean in their actual self-interest rather than, say, what they have been made to believe is in their self-interest.
> Deindustrialization and Nikefication in the past several decades isn't "rational" long-term behavior either.
Maybe, but I was responding to "They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice."
There's an implication here, and in a subsequent reply that people voting against their interests is "[t]he go to midwit rationalization for every electoral loss", that people exercised free will when they voted.
This is plainly incorrect, because free will quite clearly does not exist. No one has ever shown the kinds of violations in the laws of physics that would be required for free will to exist.
Since free will does not exist, there is simply no a priori reason to believe that people voted in their interests. People's voting decisions, like everything else they do, are out of their control. To the extent that they vote in a particular way that's good or bad for them, it's driven purely by luck and circumstances.
It is this a priori belief that people vote or act in their own interests that's the real "midwit rationalization".
> There's an implication here, that people exercised free will when they voted.
There's no such implication.
> This is plainly incorrect, because free will quite clearly does not exist.
> Since free will does not exist, there is simply no a priori reason to believe that people voted in their interests.
What are you even talking about.
People (and living beings in general) acting in their own self-interest - pretty much all the time - it is the most universal general principle of life if there ever was one. This doesn't require or involve free will.
How well a biorobot (no free will!) executes in pursuing his self-interests, is the selection critereon.
Now, the people make mistakes pursuing their self-interests, doesn't mean they aren't acting in their self-interest. Because they sure as hell are - all the frigging time! It's their whole firmware!
Deindustrialization / nikefication all the way through the value chain except the very, very top last step of the value add - hasn't been in their self-interest, it isn't in the interests of their nation either.
It's only in the self-interests of short-term thinking shareholders that min-max asset valuations with great costs to everyone else but themselves.
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