Comment by pdonis
5 days ago
> The correct thing to do if someone asks you a question with obviously false premises is to push back!
More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
That kind of intellectually dominated "democracy" killed well over a hundred million people in the 20th century. And the people who promoted the horribly oppressive governments that did it--the Soviet Union, Mao's People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, etc.--were among the most intellectually sophisticated and literate people on the planet.
None of this is to say that illiteracy and ignorance are good things. They're not. I'm much better off in my personal life being literate and knowledgeable. But literacy and knowledge have limits, and the people who want to dictate how entire societies should be organized and run based on their literacy and knowledge are in over their heads. Basic human instincts and intuitions, like the ones those villagers had that Luria completely missed, contain valuable information too.
> More generally, Luria completely ignores a key psychological dynamic that's in play as he tries to quiz these villagers: they're going to be suspicious of why he's even doing all this in the first place. What is he up to? And of course he was up to something: he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
This doesn't explain the difference between the collective farm workers, who were actually forced by the government to change their lives, and the villagers who were not forced to change their lives. Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
> the villagers who were not forced to change their lives
They were--they just hadn't been yet when Luria ran his experiments.
> Why wouldn't the farm workers be even more suspicious, having already been victimized?
They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
> They might have been, but they also knew from experience that "do whatever this party apparatchik asks you to do, no matter how pointless it seems" was a better strategy for staying alive.
Why didn't the villagers come to the same conclusion, especially since you're suggesting that the villagers were fearful of this person?
> Note that I am not arguing that the cognitive differences Luria observed were not real.
But that's the crucial question!
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> he was a agent of a horribly oppressive government that was trying to totally change the villagers' lives.
These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs in order to assign every death under communism as a death caused by communism. It's not even intellectually dishonest, it's not intellectual at all.
If Stalin didn't kill enough people for you that you still feel the need to inflate the numbers, it's an indication of how many murders you're willing to excuse for your preferred system: "We only killed 50 million!"
For a salient example, see the "60,000" protestors killed in Iran. What's a few exploded schoolgirls in comparison to that?
> These were previously peasants still under feudal lords.
What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.
> Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.
And you think the communists taught the peasants to read for the benefit of the peasants? It is to laugh.
> This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs
I'm not ignoring them at all. Where did I say that it was perfectly okay for tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs to kill people?
Indeed, if you look at how societies under tyrannical royals or capitalist oligarchs are run, they basically have the same problem I described: one person, or a small elite, at the top thinks they know enough to run an entire society. But they don't. And their attempts to do it cause massive human suffering and death.
People who are illiterate and ignorant despite being intellectually capable were a burden to society and overal considered undesirable. The goal was to improve the quality of living for all people in society and educated workers, engineers and burocrats were needed
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> What feudal lords? From the article's description it seems like they were basically on their own before the Soviet Union came in.
The Alai region was not "feudal" in the European sense but it was a tribal system where power was centralized in a layer of elite lords. While pastures were communal and not "owned" by individuals, livestock was private and literate, wealthy aristocratic elites owned massive herds using their prestige to command the loyalty of poorer tribal members
The Soviet government was actively working to replace the Arabic literacy of these elites with Latin and Cyrillic script to break the their influence