r/SubredditDrama • u/usrname42 • May 30 '16
The Second BadX War begins: drama in /r/badphilosophy when it links to a thread in /r/badeconomics that links to another thread in /r/badeconomics that links to a thread in /r/badsocialscience that links to a thread in /r/badeconomics
The First BadX War was a conflict for the ages. It spanned 9 different subreddits, featured a post that was about 7 meta links deep, and spawned two /r/SubredditDramaDrama posts. It was sparked by an argument about socialism. After the fighting died down, /r/badeconomics thought that the wars were over and there would be peace in our time.
The conflict begins as one of the mods of /r/badeconomics suggests that Marxism is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths. Arguments with various members of the subreddit (including other mods) ensue about the extent to which Marxism is actually to blame for the deaths under nominally Communist regimes, and whether capitalism has also caused hundreds of millions of deaths.
/r/badsocialscience then linked to the argument in /r/badeconomics, criticising the anti-Marx posts. Relatively little drama developed in that thread.
Subsequently the /r/badeconomics argument was linked to in a separate thread in /r/badeconomics, alleging there was badeconomics in the argument. This spawned massive arguments, with particularly dramatic threads including one user bringing up an argument they had in /r/CapitalismVSocialism weeks previously, an argument over whether Marx actually influenced mainstream economics, and walls of text on whether capitalism is linked to imperialism/colonialism.
The regular discussion thread in /r/badeconomics the next day had lots of discussion about the war. The mod who started the arguments sticked a somewhat passive-aggressive comment about how criticism of Marx gets analysed in a lot more detail than criticism of anyone else. The pro-Marxists responded here and here. There was another separate rehashing of the argument in the same thread. Finally, someone commented that "Philosophically, Marx has not contributed any original important work either... He is more overrated than Kanye West and Mother Teresa." This sparked the ire of both philosophers and the Yeezy Militia. The pro-Marxist who earlier posted this thread now posted that comment to /r/badphilosophy. Another argument developed over whether Marx influenced mainstream economics or not.
Yesterday's /r/badeconomics discussion thread was talking about the /r/badphilosophy thread; there wasn't much drama there because no Marxists turned up to argue with the /r/badeconomics members. One limit to the popcorn is that only people who have already made a post in /r/badeconomics are allowed to comment in the discussion thread, so only the pro-Marxists who are regulars can comment in those threads. Outside the discussion thread anyone can comment.
That's as far as it's got so far. The meta linking now goes /r/subredditdrama -> /r/badeconomics -> /r/badphilosophy -> /r/badeconomics -> /r/badeconomics -> /r/badsocialscience -> /r/badeconomics. Hopefully another argument about Marxism or economics will also break out in this thread, and then we can extend it to /r/subredditdramadrama.
The moral of the story? Don't talk about Marx on reddit if you don't want to get involved in a multi-subreddit many-hundred-comment war.
Disclaimer: I commented in a few of the threads; I've tried to write the argument up impartially and I wasn't involved in any of the biggest arguments.
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u/DaftPrince May 30 '16
If we report this incorrectly, can we submit it to r/badhistory 20 years later?
RemindMe! 20 years "The time has come. Go, be the historian you always pretended you were."
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u/84981725891758912576 May 30 '16
Someone do something bad so that this can get linked to a BadX sub.
Uh, something something socialism?
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u/jsmooth7 May 30 '16
You are standing at a switch in a track and a train is coming. If you do nothing, the train will run over all the third party candidates in the US election, forcing you pick to vote for a lesser of two evils. If you pull the switch, the train will deliver a new money printing machine to the Fed, leading to more inflation which is theft.
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u/Works_of_memercy May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
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u/Illogical_Blox May 30 '16
Broken link, bro.
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u/Works_of_memercy May 30 '16
Thanks, and u/Tolni too, fixed. Turns out TVTropes randomly throttles hotlinking, or something.
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u/Works_of_memercy May 30 '16
Is there a place where such are collected? I've only seen that weird 8ch board the name of which I forgot. Where they ship Scott with the Big Yud etc.
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u/lelarentaka May 30 '16
I would just lie down on the track, cause I don't want to live with either of those choices
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u/rudhira_kali_ca May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
Bad history: Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire, library of Alexandria was a tragedy, the Civil War was about states' rights
Bad linguistics: AAVE is improper English, "I'm not homophobic/transphobic because I'm not afraid of gays/trans people", "literally" doesn't mean "literally" anymore, Sanskrit is the perfect language for computer programming
Bad politics: http://www.politicalcompass.org/
Bad everything: Sargon of Akkad and Black Pigeon Speaks are good youtubers
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May 30 '16 edited Dec 19 '16
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u/Fletch71011 May 30 '16
Wait, I know I'm opening up a can of worms here, but why isn't the Library of Alexandria a tragedy? I know the outright burning might not have happened but isn't there solid evidence we did lose a significant amount of its contents one way or another?
Hopefully my idiocy does the job and gets us linked.
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May 30 '16
Most of the contents were copied elsewhere,the library (typically) wasn't accessible to the public, few made use of it, it had gone into a long period of decline for many years before it's death and suffered many fires that had already destroyed many of it's works. And by all odds it was not torched that last time by Muslim invaders or Christian zealots but in a plain old accidental city fire. Tragic yes, but if it didn't happen we wouldn't be on Jupiter, little if anything would change
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u/LukaCola May 30 '16
Tragic yes, but if it didn't happen we wouldn't be on Jupiter, little if anything would change
I don't think people are saying the lost tomes of Atlantis are there, but good documentation of the ancient world can be scarce and this was undoubtedly a pretty major resource no matter how you slice it. Losing that, regardless of how it happened, is pretty tragic.
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May 30 '16
I think there's like 10 different accounts of how the Library of Alexandria was supposedly destroyed by whatever nefarious force. Some are centuries apart from each other.
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u/rudhira_kali_ca May 30 '16
This post gives some good insight: https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1nqrl0/carl_sagan_the_library_of_alexandria_and_the/
(probably shouldn't need an np because it's archived, but still)
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u/snallygaster May 30 '16
I fail to see why losing a massive collection of texts isn't a tragedy even if Sagan got his facts wrong and used hyperbole. The idea that the destruction of the library wasn't significant seems like contrarianism.
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u/andrew2209 May 30 '16
Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire
What's the truth about that one?
Pretty convinced that puts a huge number of 18-25 year olds in the "left-libertarian category", which extrapolates to a lot of the viewpoints I see on reddit
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u/rudhira_kali_ca May 30 '16
It's technically true, but it's a pretty pointless and ignorant comparison, more here
And yeah it seems like almost everyone I know ends up getting the green square. Now, I admit that I really know little about political science even having taken a class on it (I got an A but remember literally nothing), but I don't really think you can truly quantify political stances.
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u/andrew2209 May 30 '16
Quantifying political positions is pointless as it depends on exactly how much people weigh each issue and how far on each side a person is. Think off all the politically-charged insults, Cuckservative, RINO, SJW, Brogressive, Reactionary, etc. Many, if not all, are based off people trying to quantify people's positions and ideology based off of certain issues and levels of "extremeness".
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u/fyijesuisunchat May 30 '16
What's the truth about that one?
It is true (ish—it's not quite clear at what point you can call it a 'university', and its major federal manifestation—the Bodleian Libraries—don't appear till 1602), but loaded, as it relies fundamentally assumptions about and lack of understanding of Meso-American societies to for its interest/shock value. It's kind of like saying Harvard is older than Milton Keynes—technically true, but not particularly shocking if you know what either of them are.
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u/andrew2209 May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
It's kind of like saying Harvard is older than Milton Keynes—technically true, but not particularly shocking if you know what either of them are.
If you're British it's probably more shocking to find a world famous place that isn't older than Milton Keynes.
EDIT-I kind of want to go to people with limited knowledge of Britain, and ask them "What do you know of Milton Keynes?" and "Did you know Harvard is older than Milton Keynes?"
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u/starlitepony May 30 '16
Never heard the Sanskrit one before. What's the logic behind that, and what makes it 'bad'?
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u/rudhira_kali_ca May 30 '16
It's generally said with nationalistic overtones, and it's bad because it implies that Sanskrit is a "perfect" language that doesn't have the irregularities of other languages, but in reality it's just as good for communicating as any other language. It also wouldn't work well for computers because Sanskrit words can have a fuckload of different meanings. For example my username: rudhira can mean red, bloody, and in some cases Mars, a kind of red stone, saffron, or the name of a city. Kali can mean black or dark blue, but kala which it comes from, well check out this list, oh and of course the name of the Hindu goddess.
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u/ussbaney May 30 '16
The Civil War was about states' rights.... a state's right to own slaves.... :)
EDIT: YOu also forgot that the Wehrmacht was the epitome of military capabilities and technology.
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u/Gapwick May 30 '16
It's possible to be both in favour of eating meat and against bestiality while maintaining a consistent moral framework.
You're welcome.
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u/LaoTzusGymShoes May 31 '16
I mean, consistency ain't worth much if you're consistently wrong.
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u/Gapwick May 31 '16
The difference lies in being able to face the fact that you aren't a perfect virtuous being, rather than rationalising away all your wrongdoing by reasoning that it can't be because you're the one doing it.
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u/cdstephens May 30 '16
It's possible to believe eating meat is wrong but continue to eat it because meat is delicious and humans are shitbags anyways.
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u/Gapwick May 30 '16
I don't know if anyone can always act perfectly in accord with their moral and ethical stances, but that's kinda irrelevant to the argument.
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May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
Carl Marx was a nonsense peddling vaginaferret and sociology is a science like a tomato is a fruit.
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May 30 '16
Hey you're right, sociology is a science the same way a tomato is a fruit. It meets all the actual established criteria but nobody seems to think of it as such.
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May 30 '16
Bad Economics: EXTERNALITIES AND FREE RIDER PROBLEMS DON'T EXIST. ALSO, GERALD FRIEDMAN DID NOTHING WRONG
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u/batmansleftnut May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
Can an idea ever really be "bad" though? Especially for the socialists/communists/liberals of badeconomics, if you're going to believe in a "system" (if you can even call it that) where everybody is equal in every way all the time, then don't you have to accept that all ideas are also equally valid?
And if badphilosophy is going to judge my ideas as good or bad, wouldn't they first have to prove that I exist? Lol good luck with that one.
I don't even think they'll be using those subs much longer. Entomollogically, "bad" is a word derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word for homosexuals, so once they realize how "problematic" that word is, I'm sure they'll rename all their subs.
EDIT: People, I was playing along with saying bad.* things. I don't actually believe any of that stuff I said.
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u/Vio_ May 30 '16
Here's the missing information on what caused a lot of famines in communist countries. It's not badeconomics and it's not badsocialscience.
What really caused it was badbiology with the implementation of Lysenkoism into agricultural practices set forth by the party for years if not decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
In the 20s-30s, Stalin used Lysenko and his brand of bad science to institute sweeping agricultural practices. This used a form of Lamarckism (why he sometimes get a worse name than he actually should) to create a new type of farming- vernalization where plants could be used to kick plant production into high gear as well as be forced into other kinds of crops. It just didn't work.
But it fit perfectly into the mainstream Communist view that man could change themselves to better entities by sheer force of will and determination- it was almost akin to using alchemy for plant biology- you apply heat and cold to change the nature of a plant to make it more productive.
Lysenko became Stalin's golden child and savior. The Soviets already had large famine prior to this due to mismanagement, but this made things even worse. Mendelian genetics was completely banned with thousands of scientists being executed or exiled. It wasn't until the middle 60s (even Khrushchev was a big proponent in it) that genetics could be even begin to be studied properly again in the USSR (what a fucking set back).
Even worse with all of this Lysenko BS just wrecking the Soviet's crop yields along with false crop reports, this ideology spread to (you guessed it) China in the late 40s through late 50s. It wasn't until the Soviets broke with the ideology that China broke as well.
All of you guys are fighting over the wrong issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Crop_experiments
This is what happens when science is misused and completely gutted by politicians and corrupt scientists to push a false agenda "in the name of science."
Marx, communism, and even capitalism have nothing to do with believing that freezing a rye seed can create a wheat plant, and you will kill, murder, or simply let millions die in the name of that scientific ideology.
This fight is pointless. Nobody wins anything here except a lesson in Soviet era genetics.
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u/usrname42 May 31 '16
I'd argue that could only cause a widespread famine under a system where the government plans the economy. If there was a more free-market system, some farms would adopt Lysenkoism while others wouldn't, and the ones that did would fail, so Lysenkoism would be naturally removed.
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u/Malthus0 May 31 '16
Here's the missing information on what caused a lot of famines in communist countries. It's not badeconomics
While I am sure what you say is true you should not underplay Soviet economic incompetence (or negligence) in agriculture. Before the Bolsheviks seized power Russian grain exports were 30% of the world total. After dependence on imported grain became a long term feature of the system. There were three types of agricultural production unit: the under prioritised (you could say exploited) pseudo coops called the collective farms, the favoured and subsidized state farms, and the personal plots the peasants were allowed to work in their own time to help with their basic subsistence. Those personal plots despite being only 4% of the total arable land would come to produce 40% of fruits berries and eggs, over 60% of potatoes and 30% of meat, milk, and vegetables. All traded in the shadow economy. A rather perverse situation for one of the two most powerful and influential nations on Earth. My source for this btw is Barkley Rosser's comparative economics textbook Chapter 10, p274
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u/Vio_ May 31 '16
Sure, but this wasn't the only time a government has instituted a new agricultural production system. It can be found going back centuries whether it was the introduction of a new crop like potatoes (which led to a number of riots) or new methods like crop rotation systems.
The reality is that the Soviets waged warfare on the very people who knew the best agricultural practices whether they were kulaks or geneticists (many of whom trained before the revolution), because Stalin found the one person who rewrote science to meet the biases of the political system, and that new system spread internationally. It doesn't matter what was being grown outside of that system- that's basically a small black market without any kind of control (good or bad), and a fraction of what was being used for the majority of the arable land. People are arguing over communism or economics or social science. It all broke down under Stalin and Lenin, not because the ideas were bad necessarily, but because both men used whatever means they could to push their own ambition and lust for power. It's no different than trying to rewrite history for Stalin. It's not a matter of if the system were to work on its own, it only mattered as long as it worked for the party leaders.
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u/Kzickas May 31 '16
One of the principal flaws of socialism and communism is the poor ability of the system to respond to feedback, lack of local control and the ability to use the apparatus of state to keep bad ideas going far beyond the point where they'd fail in a less controlled system. Central control is not unique to communism, but centralized control of the economy is one the defining traits of communism compared to other relevant political philosophies. It is absolutely fair in the political landscape of modern western countries to describe the failings of centralized economic control as a failing of socialism.
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u/Vio_ May 31 '16
One of the simple flaws of a brutal dictatorship is rewarding psychopaths who are more than happy to have thousands of people murdered just to prove their own worth.
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May 30 '16 edited Dec 19 '16
Weird
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May 30 '16
I wouldn't call them right wing, they held strawpolls about the election and Hillary won by huge margins. They're very pro economic orthodoxy, and as a consequence anti Bernie.
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u/andrew2209 May 30 '16
To be fair, on a worldwide spectrum Clinton would still probably be considered centrist. Also it's purely anecdotal but at my university and my friendship group, most people doing economics tend to lie centre to centre-right (the economics students I know tend to be split between Lib Dem and Tory)
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u/Krodis May 30 '16
I think part of the problem is that if badeconomics was really dedicated to only calling out badeconomics, it would be a very dry sub. People have a lot of trouble keeping their normative and positive views separate, and as a result end up conflating the two. In the case of economics, that means people end up making political, philosophical, sociological, etc; statements with extreme frequency when discussing economics. (And then when called out on it, sort of retreat to a bubble of "I'm just talking about economics")
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u/_watching May 30 '16
The trouble is additionally the reverse - people who know about sociology or philosophy think their sociological or philosophical understanding has anything to do with how economics play out, and start calling out pretty non-controversial economic stances as "bad______" because it disagrees with their views.
Not to say badecon is always right just to say it goes both ways, esp. because these subs are mostly undergrads tbh.
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u/iamelben May 30 '16
I'd argue that r/badeconomics is more centrist than right-wing, though that might translate as right-wing if people are pretty lefty. For instance, we support a moderate increase in the minimum wage (maybe to 12 bucks...maybe), but on the aggregate, we think $15 nation-wide minimum wage is batty and will hurt more people than it will help.
I'm probably a bit more lefty than some of the other regulars, but there's fairly robust pushback to the more libertarian/conservative stuff. Here's an example from yesterday:
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May 30 '16
I'm pretty sure subscribing to a sub for mocking libertarians does not make you "far left".
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u/Vakieh May 30 '16
Well, at least you learned to name your links better in the interim.
Too bad the number of them appears to have made all the shillbots shit their pants and die.
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u/ElagabalusRex May 30 '16
It turns out the BadX subreddits are not as infallible as we thought they were.
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May 30 '16
It turns out the BadX subreddits are not as infallible as
we thought they werethey think they are.FTFY fam. According to badecon my country doesn't exist.
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u/Draber-Bien May 30 '16
According to badecon my country doesn't exist.
It'll be a cold day in hell before I recognise Norway as a sovereign state!
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u/IStandWithMises May 30 '16
Which country do you live in? And what do you mean when you say they dont think it exists?
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u/machenise May 30 '16
I'm going to need a little more information here, please.
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u/zegafregaomega May 30 '16
Holy shit this is like academia but Reddit drama.
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u/KaliYugaz May 31 '16
The academic subreddits have the best drama. You can just imagine them all hunched over their computers in a dark, sweaty, PhD-comics-esque university basement, getting furiously incensed over some esoteric point of contention that only a couple thousand people in the whole world even understand (much less have a coherent opinion on), and then angrily hammering out a wall of impenetrable jargon-filled text with 20 JSTOR tabs open in the background as reference.
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u/shannondoah May 31 '16
I'd imagine that'd be u/Valarauko whenever he explains history and genetics and linguistics at r/India or r/Hinduism far more.
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u/mrmcdude May 30 '16
This is what happens when people devoted to being the most smugly condescending person in the room get caught in a feedback loop.
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May 30 '16
Better buy an RV so I can go out in the dessert and cook... Popcorn.
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May 30 '16 edited Dec 19 '16
Weird
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May 30 '16
I know you're making a joke, but a lot of the regulars on BE are grad students, PhDs, professors, or work in the industry. That doesn't mean they know much about Marx, though.
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u/freet0 May 31 '16
It's one of the better of the "bad" subs. badphilosophy and badsocialscience rely way too much on opinion to be criticizing anyone else as "bad"
(Note that saying someone is doing "bad philosophy" is very different from disagreeing with someone on a philosophical issue. Philosophers do that second one all the time)
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u/akkmedk May 30 '16
Clearly it's the Bad World War. Lot of bad men lost a lot of karma. Tragic really.
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u/holditsteady May 30 '16
Imma let you finish, but Kanye West is the greatest artistic genius of all time.
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u/__Archipelago May 30 '16
All of them are good when they are talking about their own subject matter. As soon as any take a step out of that they become as bad as the rest of reddit.
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u/TomShoe May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
I like Badecon, but I have to say I think Badsocialscience is right here. Marxism is a big tent, and has been going back well before October 1917. No doubt marxist ideology played a central part in the creating the USSR and communist China, but that's no reason to write off all Marxist thought. Plenty of Marxist both at the time, and since then have been very much opposed to those regimes, and regardless of the ideologies connection to them, it's still been very influential in the various social sciences.
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u/krutopatkin May 30 '16
Daily reminder badhistory is the only good badx subreddit
Linguistics is aight i guess
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u/mgrier123 May 30 '16
r/badscience is pretty good. To be fair though, since it's science, it's pretty hard for the politics to come into the explanations there, it tends to be pretty factual.
Well, except for when the nazis make stupid comments using "facts" to justify their racism.
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u/4THOT May 30 '16
>implying the redpanda meme cesspool of r/badphilosophy isn't the pinnacle of culture
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May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
Even BH is kind of shit these days. The last batch of mods kinda gaffed things up. It's basically dead now --it has like 10x as many subs as other BadX subs like politics or philosophy or whatever and they have less activity than them all. It's insane seeing a sub with 61,000 subs have a front page of half meta threads and 3 week old submissions.
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u/The_Silver_Avenger May 30 '16
Honestly, r/badeconomics hasn't been as interesting to read since the requirements on the discussion thread were introduced. I know I'm biased (since I took part in it before the requirements were introduced and since I'm not an economist I'm not expecting to submit a post making me eligible any time soon) but the nature of discourse in the threads have lately been... unpleasant? Almost spiteful. And also just less interesting to read generally. There's no impetus for me to create an eligibility thread to take part anymore.
The number of "actual" r/badeconomics threads have been decreasing lately, the number of comments in the discussion threads have decreased and don't show any sign of increasing and overall I've just been reading the content less lately.
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u/devinejoh May 30 '16
At one point half of the front page contained the daily discussion threads, which is not the point of the sub. Commenting in the discussion threads is a privilege which drives content, and if you ask me has worked out quite well.
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u/ZedarFlight May 30 '16
After checking out comments on the first war, I'm glad to see you learned to name links more descriptively
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u/Unsub_Lefty May 30 '16
Not sure if I'm happy or disappointed that r/badhistory hasn't been involved in either of these BadX wars. We're too drunk watching terrible documentaries I guess
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u/tawtaw May 31 '16
This goes further and further back though. I mean a few days prior, r/badeconomics linked to r/badsocialscience to circlejerk about one of their normal contributors being a dumb-dumb for calling out some nonsense over homelessness then at least one mod nuked comments explaining why this was in conflict with current anthropological work.
A lot of this is probably just the US campaign season intensifying the need for these people to affirm their political priors. But some of it is just petty childish games. This is barely above ___jobrumors forums' constant publishing peen measurement contests.
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u/Analog265 May 31 '16
Idk why I even bother reading academic subreddits.
It's the nature of Reddit that encourages people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about to pretend they do.
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u/ItsYaBoyChipsAhoy May 30 '16
How do BadX subs go? I'm subbed to r/badphilosophy and I don't get it
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u/Goatf00t May 30 '16
It's unsurprising, since badphil is an admitted circlejerk, a place to vent, not to educate. Most other badX subs are not like that and require some explanation of why the thing highlighted is an example of bad X. The amounts of required and actually demonstrated rigor vary by subreddit.
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u/mikerhoa May 30 '16
Well r/badhistory is designed to call out revisionism and just plain falsehood that's posted on various websites- but mostly reddit itself.
Some examples of this would be nazi apologia and holocaust denial that play fast and loose with historical record, the gross misrepresentations of the events leading up to the US Civil War perpetuated by the "States' Rights" crowd, and challenging the alleged "factual basis" of books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and whatever Dan Brown has cooked up.
It's a fun sub actually. Give it a look!
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May 30 '16
badphil is for people to laugh at shitty takes on "philosophy" by people who don't know what they're talking about without having the joke explained. There's a strict no-learns policy, which is why I love that sub - so if you're confused, go to askphil. That's actually a very good and helpful sub, in my experience. The general trends should be pretty clear, though.
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u/LePhilosophyDefener May 31 '16
You know you're a great scholar when the mere mention of your name a hundred or so later turns everything into a gigantic slap fight. You don't see Aristotle and anti-Aristotle slap fights as often as Marx and anti-Marx ones lol.
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u/Malthus0 May 31 '16
You know you're a great scholar
Or a vague and ideological one. No two Marx scholars seem to have the same interpretation of his writings. Those who bother to actually try to understand him are generally those who actively like his politics and those who actively don't. And of course there are plenty of people who don't take the time to try to understand him but weigh in anyway to add to the confusion.
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May 30 '16
America was always run as a Marxist economy, but they have been using propaganda to disguise it from the people.
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May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
[ＨＥＡＶＹ ＢＲＥＡＴＨＩＮＧ]
EDIT: lord grant me the strength to not take the bait
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u/DatParadox May 30 '16
children dying in the streets everyday
elite class making billions a year while the workers for them make barely enough to live
class exists in general
we have a "representative state"
Not too Marxist to me!
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May 30 '16
Fuck r/badeconomics. It really proves Joan Robinson's statement that "Economics has always been partly a vehicle for the ruling ideology of each period as well as partly a method of scientific investigation. It limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans."
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u/wumbotarian May 31 '16
Gentle reminder that Joan Robinson was a supporter of Kim Il Sung and called Pyongyang a utopia.
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u/Rflkt May 30 '16
I noticed that the users in bad subs tend to be just as bad/ignorant as the people they make fun of for not knowing.
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u/RedCanada May 31 '16
There's an old saying: ask three economists a question and you'll get five answers.
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u/Zombies_hate_ninjas May 30 '16
You know who takes Marx seriously? Angsty teenagers and ass hats on the internet. Since I'm one of those two things, let's just jump right into this! /s
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May 30 '16 edited May 30 '16
Utter garbage, really. The problem with economics as I see it is that it's not a hard science that can actually prove things. It tries to be, but studies show that conservative economists 'prove' that conservative economic policies are more beneficial, while liberal economists 'prove' the same about their own policies.
So arguments about who is right or wrong, or even how closely economic ideas are related to reality, get more desperate the longer they continue. Economics seems to be the the most well -funded pseudoscience of our time, and our societies actually buy the snake oil with utter confidence in its authenticity.
However, I think it's only because we haven't figured out better ways to measure large scale social functions. We're living in the age of the economist, and once we escape it we'll wonder how we ever managed to survive it.
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u/misterhamtastic May 31 '16
I think it's funny that anyone believes that either of these systems works well in all cases. Capitalism is driven by greed and/or self preservation. Communism requires honor on all parts and incorruptible leadership.
So. When will Artificial Intelligence be ready?
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u/2xtroubleboilnbubble May 30 '16
somebody please tell me which sub is in the right so I know which way to jerk thank xx