5HC : Skinner, Turing

Iorwerth Thomas · 04 Feb 2005, 06:58 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Fri Feb  4 06:58:08 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing
In-Reply-To: <E1Cwoc5-000IB6-DT at oceanus.uk.clara.net>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F28D84E3B916658ECB74FC1B9700 at phx.gbl>

>From: "Andy Robertson" <andywrobertson at clara.co.uk>

>We are chattering about science, and forgetting what is really important in 
>understanding the human world (even the world of humans in books), which is 
>politics.
>
>The real emergent utility of Skinner's work - the way it was **used** in 
>the real world - iwas to provide a shield of intellectual justification to 
>those who want to reshape human behaviour through social engineering; which 
>aim is, itself, merely a cloak over their own Inner Party desire for power.
>

Oh God, the justification of dubious politics by attatching the word 
'scientific' to it.  The same happened with Darwinism - Herbet Spencer and 
the 'scientific' Social Darwinists.  Yes, I can see why some would find it 
useful.  You'd be referring to certain Marxists, right?

It's probably not a coincidence that the conspiracy in Grant Morrison's 
'Invisibles' sometimes slip into behaviourist-type rhetoric.

>
>I'm not sure Skinner was guilty of intending this end (I doubt it), but his 
>work fitted perfectly into the environmentalist dogmas of his age, like the 
>fraudulent "anthropology" of Margaret Mead and her mentor Franz Boaz.
>

One of the best critiques of environmentalist 'blank-slate' dogma, IMO, is 
probably 'Beast and Man' by Mary Midgley, herself a left-wing moral 
philosopher.  But she's a virtue ethicist, and thus can't believe the 'blank 
slate' stuff on pain of self contradiction.

>Wolfe sets his face like granite against this slavery, in book after book.

And rightly so.  It's one of  the few political views I share in common with 
him.

Iorwerth

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net