The following is a repetition (with a few subedits and an update re Tim Pearce), of an earlier conversation (ie from 2014).
I think that it is, still, a useful encapsulation:
--------------
More on that political diagram
and on Personal Paradigms, too!
I hope it helps.
Thx Ley 4 yr comment. I add in some of 'mine' at the >j pointers:
Ley : When referring to time, the general accepted method is ''the coil/the spiral''.
>j Interesting! The idea of a spiral of time is certainly far better than the circle of time 'What goes around, comes around', 'History repeats itself', etc.
In the English-speaking world we read text from the left-hand side to the right-hand side: that's why I prefer to put the Progressive end of the horizontal axis in 'my' diagram on the right – while, yes, the progressive side is often referred to as the 'Left'.
And, correspondingly, the Reactionary (Right politically) as the history end of the horizontal axis.
Incidentally, as I understand it, the political left/right denoters is an artefact of a French Revolutionary parliament: the progressives sat on the left-hand side of the speaker, with the reactionaries on the right-hand side of the speaker. My guess is that the first person to sit down defined where his friends and opponents sat – it would have been more helpful for 'my' diagram if it had happened otherwise!
Incidentally, 'my' diagram goes back to a posting on a 90's listsev called Co-opnet. My friend and fellow co-operator, Tim Pearce (now, sadly, deceased) pointed out that the Political Compass site had prefigured 'mine'.
Time (as it were!) has moved on and I've found many of these 'two-dimensional/Four quadrant' maps – and I've tried to cross-correlate them in a Pdf of a Powerpoint in the papers at www.interestfreemoney.org , called 'Emotions, Personalities and Politics'.
Ley : (Also, I'm typically bad at explaining things without visual aid, so please bear with me).
>j Yes – it will be a good deal easier when we can all write/say directly onto Facebook – this world is still obsessed with speech (parliaments etc) whereas, as a chemist I much prefer symbolic language and diagrams . . .
So, back to your spiral of time:
Ley : It's like a point that starts in the center, starts going out like a circle, and then goes round and round itself. The reaon for this is that the brain will then read it like a clock, and thus it helps processing of the information.
>j Nice!
Another point is that in thermodynamics (a part of chemistry that tackles the 'why' and 'how' of chemical processes – including life processes and the way the universe works – including how/why it is expanding) a key 'Law' (ie a Truth that is so until we disprove it) is the Second Law of Thermodynamics: a Law that is sometimes referred to as 'The Arrow of Time'.
This says (as does your spiral) that the universe moves on – that going back is not possible (the Second Law has much more to say, but for now it's this time aspect that's important here).
So, whether that forward direction of time is spiral shaped (hard to draw on a computer screen!) or linear, I'm not sure.
But, in a political sense, the arrow can, as in 'my' diagram, be pushed backwards in a reactionary direction, politically – at immense cost in terms of natural forces (entropy, enthalpy, etc) – ie in an unnatural way.
And that certainly seems the case if I look at the past 50 years – from the positives of the 60's to the catastrophe of 'now'.
Ley : The other reason your graph falls short is that you have the right and left political axis inverted, which makes this ungrokkable (being grokkable means ''to understand without explaination''). Because of the inversion, the viewer has actually read the graph and 'remember' the inversion, taking away from the impact and time put into self-debating the points you make.
>j Agreed somewhat, but I still think that this effort is worthwhile.
Let me give you a hazy recollection: at one time electricity was deemed (quite arbitrarily to flow from the positive pole of a battery (+) to the negative pole (-). The experimental reality seems, better, to be that electrons (which are negatively-charged – negatively in an arbitrary sense, too) flow from the negative pole (negative since it is populated by ad excess of negatively-charged electrons) to the positive pole (positively-charged since it has a deficit of electrons over the positively-charged atomic nuclei there).
This is a characteristic of human learning - we often get it 'right' but 'back to front!
(BTW a) a good way of thinking about anything is to, first examine it 'back-to-front' and then at right-angles to what is being proposed.
For example, capitalism says that owning economic resources ('property') is a good thing. The reverse, that owning economic resources ('property') is a *bad* thing is worthwhile considering – as is the perpendicular concept (perhaps) that that owning economic resources ('property') is neither a good thing nor a bad thing (but a nonsense!).
Ley : I really do think you have a good idea, and I really appreciate the good natured intentions. I just think it's worth making a second revision or experimenting with it so that it's more accessible to everyone on an immediate basis.
j> Thx! In those papers at www.interestfreemoney.org, I've placed an essay called 'How Rigid is your Paradigm?'
That points out that human knowledge is better discussed a paradigm rather than belief, that paradigms evolve – sometimes by paradigm shifts of direction and sometime, even, paradigm inversions (ie that which we thought was right has to be inverted by 180 degrees).
The story of phlogiston and oxygen is a good example: at one time chemists thought that fuels released phlogiston into the atmosphere when they burnt, whereas the oxygen theory says/shows that oxygen if combined from the atmosphere when fuels burn.
Oh, and that essay 'introduces' the idea that we all have a personal paradigm.
'My' personal paradigm is extended by your comment that time is/may be spiral not linear – or even jerky (in either a spiral or linear sense – maybe as the arrows on 'my' political diagram speculates!
And, I guess that's what we're partly here to do – to learn, share, give!
Ley : (Regarding Grokkable, it's also that sensation you get when you see something and it just ''makes sense'', and you wonder why others haven't done it that way before. Intuitive is another similar word).
I think that it is, still, a useful encapsulation:
--------------
More on that political diagram
and on Personal Paradigms, too!
I hope it helps.
Thx Ley 4 yr comment. I add in some of 'mine' at the >j pointers:
Ley : When referring to time, the general accepted method is ''the coil/the spiral''.
>j Interesting! The idea of a spiral of time is certainly far better than the circle of time 'What goes around, comes around', 'History repeats itself', etc.
In the English-speaking world we read text from the left-hand side to the right-hand side: that's why I prefer to put the Progressive end of the horizontal axis in 'my' diagram on the right – while, yes, the progressive side is often referred to as the 'Left'.
And, correspondingly, the Reactionary (Right politically) as the history end of the horizontal axis.
Incidentally, as I understand it, the political left/right denoters is an artefact of a French Revolutionary parliament: the progressives sat on the left-hand side of the speaker, with the reactionaries on the right-hand side of the speaker. My guess is that the first person to sit down defined where his friends and opponents sat – it would have been more helpful for 'my' diagram if it had happened otherwise!
Incidentally, 'my' diagram goes back to a posting on a 90's listsev called Co-opnet. My friend and fellow co-operator, Tim Pearce (now, sadly, deceased) pointed out that the Political Compass site had prefigured 'mine'.
Time (as it were!) has moved on and I've found many of these 'two-dimensional/Four quadrant' maps – and I've tried to cross-correlate them in a Pdf of a Powerpoint in the papers at www.interestfreemoney.org , called 'Emotions, Personalities and Politics'.
Ley : (Also, I'm typically bad at explaining things without visual aid, so please bear with me).
>j Yes – it will be a good deal easier when we can all write/say directly onto Facebook – this world is still obsessed with speech (parliaments etc) whereas, as a chemist I much prefer symbolic language and diagrams . . .
So, back to your spiral of time:
Ley : It's like a point that starts in the center, starts going out like a circle, and then goes round and round itself. The reaon for this is that the brain will then read it like a clock, and thus it helps processing of the information.
>j Nice!
Another point is that in thermodynamics (a part of chemistry that tackles the 'why' and 'how' of chemical processes – including life processes and the way the universe works – including how/why it is expanding) a key 'Law' (ie a Truth that is so until we disprove it) is the Second Law of Thermodynamics: a Law that is sometimes referred to as 'The Arrow of Time'.
This says (as does your spiral) that the universe moves on – that going back is not possible (the Second Law has much more to say, but for now it's this time aspect that's important here).
So, whether that forward direction of time is spiral shaped (hard to draw on a computer screen!) or linear, I'm not sure.
But, in a political sense, the arrow can, as in 'my' diagram, be pushed backwards in a reactionary direction, politically – at immense cost in terms of natural forces (entropy, enthalpy, etc) – ie in an unnatural way.
And that certainly seems the case if I look at the past 50 years – from the positives of the 60's to the catastrophe of 'now'.
Ley : The other reason your graph falls short is that you have the right and left political axis inverted, which makes this ungrokkable (being grokkable means ''to understand without explaination''). Because of the inversion, the viewer has actually read the graph and 'remember' the inversion, taking away from the impact and time put into self-debating the points you make.
>j Agreed somewhat, but I still think that this effort is worthwhile.
Let me give you a hazy recollection: at one time electricity was deemed (quite arbitrarily to flow from the positive pole of a battery (+) to the negative pole (-). The experimental reality seems, better, to be that electrons (which are negatively-charged – negatively in an arbitrary sense, too) flow from the negative pole (negative since it is populated by ad excess of negatively-charged electrons) to the positive pole (positively-charged since it has a deficit of electrons over the positively-charged atomic nuclei there).
This is a characteristic of human learning - we often get it 'right' but 'back to front!
(BTW a) a good way of thinking about anything is to, first examine it 'back-to-front' and then at right-angles to what is being proposed.
For example, capitalism says that owning economic resources ('property') is a good thing. The reverse, that owning economic resources ('property') is a *bad* thing is worthwhile considering – as is the perpendicular concept (perhaps) that that owning economic resources ('property') is neither a good thing nor a bad thing (but a nonsense!).
Ley : I really do think you have a good idea, and I really appreciate the good natured intentions. I just think it's worth making a second revision or experimenting with it so that it's more accessible to everyone on an immediate basis.
j> Thx! In those papers at www.interestfreemoney.org, I've placed an essay called 'How Rigid is your Paradigm?'
That points out that human knowledge is better discussed a paradigm rather than belief, that paradigms evolve – sometimes by paradigm shifts of direction and sometime, even, paradigm inversions (ie that which we thought was right has to be inverted by 180 degrees).
The story of phlogiston and oxygen is a good example: at one time chemists thought that fuels released phlogiston into the atmosphere when they burnt, whereas the oxygen theory says/shows that oxygen if combined from the atmosphere when fuels burn.
Oh, and that essay 'introduces' the idea that we all have a personal paradigm.
'My' personal paradigm is extended by your comment that time is/may be spiral not linear – or even jerky (in either a spiral or linear sense – maybe as the arrows on 'my' political diagram speculates!
And, I guess that's what we're partly here to do – to learn, share, give!
Ley : (Regarding Grokkable, it's also that sensation you get when you see something and it just ''makes sense'', and you wonder why others haven't done it that way before. Intuitive is another similar word).
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