If there is a group of people interested in communism that should be communists. But do they really know about communism? By this I don't mean their proficiency in Marxism-Leninism or Historical Materialism, but about the economic history of actually existing communist (Okay, socialist in Marxist parlance) regimes. In this post, I investigate this.
My method is the following: First, I assemble a list of experts on communism. This list includes people that I've referenced before in mySoviet series, and on th…
In a previous post I argued against Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, and others, that Philosophical zombies are conceivable. In this one I challenge the P-zombie argument against physicalism.
P-zombies are usually invoked to argue that physicalism is false. Philosophers seem to agree that this is the case:
It seems that if zombies really are possible, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism is true. For many philosophers that is the chief importance of the zombie idea. [...]
However, not everyon…
[Part of the Soviet Union series]
The Soviet labour 'market' was a peculiar one. Rather than the prevalence of unemployment, as we are used to, the Soviet Union not only achieved full employment, but also got to a situation where there were_shortages of labour,_even though a significant share of the population was working. In this post I clarify what does full employment mean in the Soviet context, and explain some aspects of their labour 'market' not covered in my previous post on this topic. As usual, thi…
At some point I plan to read (some of) the references below. Feel free to suggest more in the comments. The general theme is Polanyi's The Great Transformation and the decades-long conversation that it originated. In bold, references that I think are the most important, and some of which I've already read.
Polanyi, K. (1957). The Great Transformation:(the Political and Economic Origin of Our Time). Beacon Press.
North, D. C. (1977). Markets and other allocation systems in history: the challenge of Karl Pola…
There are a series of issues that, I think, heavily condition one's political beliefs. They are empirically solvable, and this is good.
One could be a perfectly coherent communist that accepted that communism doesn't produce as much material wealth as capitalism, and ends up stagnating, and even accept that a fraction of rulers will be murderous, and accept everything bad that has been said about communism, and still be a communist just because one has the idea that it is just and good. This happens because…
Some people seem to have problems conceiving philosophical zombies. In this post, I try to show that they are conceivable. (And I only defend that claim) I am not endorsing any particular philosophy of mind here.
Note that according to the Philpapers survey, P-zombie inconceivability is the minority position.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyS4VFh3xOU
Robin Hanson, here says
Carroll inspires me to try to make one point I think worth making, even if it is also ignored. My target is people who think philoso…