Cultural Anthropology of Atlas Shrugged
All definitions here come from the Anthropology glossary at Palomar College, San Marcos, California.
(https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/tutor...)
They are inline with what I learned, not special, just convenient to quote.
Remember when Dagny was in the Valley and found out that she could not buy gold?
special purpose money -- objects that serve as a medium of exchange in only limited contexts. In societies that have it, usually there are certain goods and services that can be purchased only with their specific form of special purpose money. If you don't have it, you cannot acquire the things that it can purchase. You may not be able to easily obtain the special purpose money either. The Tiv people of central Nigeria provide an example. In the past, they used brass rods to buy cattle and to pay bride price. These rods were acquired by trade from Sahara Desert trading peoples who ultimately obtained them from the urbanized societies of North Africa. If a man could not acquire brass rods by trade or borrowing them, he would be prevented from acquiring cattle and getting married.
Why did they have the Strike?
applied anthropology -- the branch of anthropology oriented towards using anthropological knowledge for practical purposes. The work of most applied anthropologists has the goal of helping small indigenous societies adjust to the massive acculturation pressures that they are now experiencing without their suffering culture death and genocide.
Who was in charge in the Valley?
acephalous -- a society in which political power is diffused to the degree that there are no institutionalized political leadership roles such as chiefs and kings. Bands and tribes are acephalous. Most foragers and simple horticulturalists have highly egalitarian, acephalous societies. The word "acephalous" is Greek for "without a head."
The Valley had many characteristics of a non-market economy.
non-market economy -- ... Work teams are small and usually only include members of the local community. Large-scale collaboration on subsistence jobs is of short duration if it occurs at all because most tasks are relatively simple and require only a few people. Work related interactions between people are of a face-to-face personal kind. People who work together hunting, gathering, herding, or tending crops are usually kinsmen or lifelong friends and neighbors. ... There also is the pleasure of working with friends and relatives. In addition there is potential for increased social prestige from doing the job well. Impersonal commercial exchanges rarely occur in non-market economies. They usually take the form of either barter or gifts. Every household usually provides for its daily needs from its own production. Non-market economies can only function successfully in isolation. They have always been destroyed by prolonged contact with societies that have market economies.
(Yes, the complete definition includes some characteristics contradictory of the intention of the Valley. Such as "Little or no attempt is made to calculate the contribution of individuals or to calculate individual shares. Social pressure generally obligates individuals to freely share food and other products of their labor with whomever needs it or asks for it in the community." While no one asked for help, it was, nonetheless offered benevolently. Again, that benevolence is typical of a market economy.)
What was the moral force that enabled the society of the Valley?
inner-directed personality -- a personality that is guilt oriented. The behavior of individuals with this sort of personality are strongly controlled by their conscience. As a result, there is little need for police to make sure that they obey the law. These individuals monitor themselves. The inner-directed personality is one of the modal personality types identified by David Riesman in the early 1950's.
What were the moral forces that opposed the Valley, or required its creation?
other-directed personality -- a personality that is shame oriented. People with this type of personality have ambiguous feelings about right and wrong. When they deviate from a societal norm, they usually don't feel guilty. However, if they are caught in the act or exposed publicly, they are likely to feel shame.
tradition-oriented personality -- a personality that has a strong emphasis on doing things the same way that they have always been done. Individuals with this sort of personality are less likely to try new things and to seek new experiences.
What anthropological principle explains the creation of the Valley?
social velocity -- the common social phenomenon in which disruptive interpersonal conflicts increasingly occur as the number of people in a society grows. Richard Lee coined this term as result of observing the phenomenon among the ju/'hoansi of southwest Africa. Band fissioning occurred before a community reached the full carrying capacity of the environment. Families decided to leave and form their own bands because the conflict settling mechanisms were not adequate to resolve differences. It was not food scarcity but, rather, social discord that was the cause of the break-up
(https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/tutor...)
They are inline with what I learned, not special, just convenient to quote.
Remember when Dagny was in the Valley and found out that she could not buy gold?
special purpose money -- objects that serve as a medium of exchange in only limited contexts. In societies that have it, usually there are certain goods and services that can be purchased only with their specific form of special purpose money. If you don't have it, you cannot acquire the things that it can purchase. You may not be able to easily obtain the special purpose money either. The Tiv people of central Nigeria provide an example. In the past, they used brass rods to buy cattle and to pay bride price. These rods were acquired by trade from Sahara Desert trading peoples who ultimately obtained them from the urbanized societies of North Africa. If a man could not acquire brass rods by trade or borrowing them, he would be prevented from acquiring cattle and getting married.
Why did they have the Strike?
applied anthropology -- the branch of anthropology oriented towards using anthropological knowledge for practical purposes. The work of most applied anthropologists has the goal of helping small indigenous societies adjust to the massive acculturation pressures that they are now experiencing without their suffering culture death and genocide.
Who was in charge in the Valley?
acephalous -- a society in which political power is diffused to the degree that there are no institutionalized political leadership roles such as chiefs and kings. Bands and tribes are acephalous. Most foragers and simple horticulturalists have highly egalitarian, acephalous societies. The word "acephalous" is Greek for "without a head."
The Valley had many characteristics of a non-market economy.
non-market economy -- ... Work teams are small and usually only include members of the local community. Large-scale collaboration on subsistence jobs is of short duration if it occurs at all because most tasks are relatively simple and require only a few people. Work related interactions between people are of a face-to-face personal kind. People who work together hunting, gathering, herding, or tending crops are usually kinsmen or lifelong friends and neighbors. ... There also is the pleasure of working with friends and relatives. In addition there is potential for increased social prestige from doing the job well. Impersonal commercial exchanges rarely occur in non-market economies. They usually take the form of either barter or gifts. Every household usually provides for its daily needs from its own production. Non-market economies can only function successfully in isolation. They have always been destroyed by prolonged contact with societies that have market economies.
(Yes, the complete definition includes some characteristics contradictory of the intention of the Valley. Such as "Little or no attempt is made to calculate the contribution of individuals or to calculate individual shares. Social pressure generally obligates individuals to freely share food and other products of their labor with whomever needs it or asks for it in the community." While no one asked for help, it was, nonetheless offered benevolently. Again, that benevolence is typical of a market economy.)
What was the moral force that enabled the society of the Valley?
inner-directed personality -- a personality that is guilt oriented. The behavior of individuals with this sort of personality are strongly controlled by their conscience. As a result, there is little need for police to make sure that they obey the law. These individuals monitor themselves. The inner-directed personality is one of the modal personality types identified by David Riesman in the early 1950's.
What were the moral forces that opposed the Valley, or required its creation?
other-directed personality -- a personality that is shame oriented. People with this type of personality have ambiguous feelings about right and wrong. When they deviate from a societal norm, they usually don't feel guilty. However, if they are caught in the act or exposed publicly, they are likely to feel shame.
tradition-oriented personality -- a personality that has a strong emphasis on doing things the same way that they have always been done. Individuals with this sort of personality are less likely to try new things and to seek new experiences.
What anthropological principle explains the creation of the Valley?
social velocity -- the common social phenomenon in which disruptive interpersonal conflicts increasingly occur as the number of people in a society grows. Richard Lee coined this term as result of observing the phenomenon among the ju/'hoansi of southwest Africa. Band fissioning occurred before a community reached the full carrying capacity of the environment. Families decided to leave and form their own bands because the conflict settling mechanisms were not adequate to resolve differences. It was not food scarcity but, rather, social discord that was the cause of the break-up
Remember that it is "romantic" fiction, not "naturalism", as Ayn Rand described the distinction in her anthology on esthetics, The Romantic Manifesto.
I somewhat understand, but a "model society" and a place where rational people freely interact with one another sound similar.
It was not intended as a model society because only select individuals were invited and it was all private with no government. But they had intended (in the plot) for it to last longer than it did because the collapse of the outer world came sooner than expected.
Ayn Rand did not write it as an independent nation or model society, only as a way to illustrate within the plot how rational people deal with each other when they are free to do so and have the right ideas. It was more than people relating to each other within a broader social context because it was a self-contained way of life for a while, but it was much less than a full "society".
The symptom of the overbearing government was the (artificially accelerated) collapse. The Valley, wasn't a symptom, it was a deliberate initiative of rational people, in the context of a plot in which they were (unrealistically outside of fiction) deliberately trying to let the outer world collapse. They then proceeded to live properly under normal conditions when they went back to the world after the collapse (after the end of the novel).
[...]
The Valley was intended as an ideal society, The Utopia of Greed."
I do not understand. The answer is probably a secret they hide in books.
I thought the Gulch was symptom of the problem of an overbearing gov't, not a model for society.
It's odd that the ancient Greeks worked on this problem, but we went for thousands of years without a real experiment in a democratic republic.
They try to protect their icon Mead, but rush to condemn real scientists. Here we see Newton falsely attacked for an alleged "refusal to accept the wave nature of light that his own experiments demonstrated" (which isn't true) in comparison with Mead's mere "errors".
Many years after reading 'Growing up In Samoa' I went thru Freeman's review.
He had gone to Samoa, found the two young women that Mead spoke with at length, they were now elderly but remembered having a great time telling stories to Mead. They were smart enough to work out what Mead wanted to hear, then that is what they said. Mead just lapped it up.
The telling part is the reaction to Freeman, fierce condemnation by the mainstream, tho' there are a few who accept the review as having more cred.
The fact that most pilots learning to fly do not have the physics and mathematical background required to understand full aerodynamical explanations does not make them "stupid". Nor is it necessary for a pilot to understand it at that level.
The commonly seen overly simplistic pseudo-explanations that do not properly explain aerofoil lift have nothing to do with the false claim that the entire professional field has been in disarray for a century, in an attempt to claim that it is no better than the dismal social sciences. Serious aerodynamics texts and courses do not present wrong theories. Those who try to present simplified "explanation" of anything in physics are often wrong or providing incomprehensible rationalization.
Glauert's The Elements of Aerofoil and Airscrew Theory is not an "arcane book". It was the first English language text incorporating Prandlt's correct essential explanations made widely available by 1926, almost a century ago. It was widely used, updated for the second edition printed as late as 1959, and re-issued in 1983 as a classic reprinted as late as 1993, including now a Kindle version. Many more modern texts have long included the correct explanations. The subject matter is not disputed and has not been presented incorrectly in serious courses. It is not a hundred year old equivalent of cargo cult social sciences.
The digression into the Wrights and the first experimental airplanes at the turn of the 20th century doesn't help. That is not the history of social science either.
None of it justifies the anthropology pseudo-scientific "identification" of the Valley in Atlas Shrugged.
The fundamental difference between individualism and tribalism and the assessment that one is better than the other are fact, not anti-science "hatred". Cultural relativism is not "science" and neither are ad hominem dismissals.
There are no "scientific identifications" in the original post. It is irrelevant pseudo scholarship that contradicts the plot and the meaning of Atlas Shrugged that it claims to "scientifically" "identify".
"Social velocity" is not a "principle [that] explains the creation of the Valley". To think that one would have to ignore the content of the book and much worse. Likewise for the claim that "inner-directed personality -- a personality that is guilt oriented" "was the moral force that enabled the society of the Valley", as well as the rest of the "identifications". Galt's speech was "guilt oriented"?
Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical novel illustrating the role of the mind in human survival: the role of ideas in how people act. Rational individualists do not think and behave like primitive tribes and neither did the heroes in Atlas Shrugged. One does not "explain" and "identify" the Valley by ignoring everything said about it in the novel and substituting pseudo scientific academic pronouncements based on alleged "scientific" observations of its opposite.
The claim, in the name of science no less, that:
"the fact remains that as a science anthropology identifies facts about cultures and societies. The Valley was a society based on a culture. The "view from the outside" reveals features of that society. ... The rest followed by reading definitions of facts from the science of anthropology"
is a non-sequitur of floating abstractions deliberately ignoring the subject matter while laughably pretending to be a scientific deduction. Rejecting such nonsense is not anti-science "hatred".
His assertion that "Engineers in particular suffer from a materialist, anti-intellectual, cookbook curriculum that appeals to religious fanatics" makes no sense at all. Neither does the claim that "Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism", another out of context anti-conceptual smear against "right wing extremists" package-dealing individualism with fascism in alleged contrast with collectivists. But that is what we get from anti-conceptual juggling of "statistics" with false premises in the name of "science".
The science of light was in its infancy, with experiments indicating unexplained phenomenon, and Newton's own experimental results contradicting others' early wave interpretations. Neither the early attempts of Newton's unidentified corpuscles nor Huygens' longitudinal waves had reached anywhere near the conceptual understanding and experiments of the much later interference experiments of Young, Maxwell's (transverse) wave equations, or quantum mechanical photons showing that light behaves in different respects with aspects of both "wave" and "particle" properties.
The early ideas of both Newton and Huygens were major contributions in understanding some basic properties of different aspects of light, with Huygens concentrating on geometry of propagation and Newton primarily on color decomposition and diffraction in physical optics. They were the beginning of a science still groping with experiment and hypothesis towards the next steps in a new realm, not "errors" or "refusals" to accept correct theories.
In contrast Margaret Mead was unscientific from the beginning. Her famous research in Samoa as a graduate student, widely accepted in her field, turned out to be largely wrong and hopeless in methodology. Her "research" was influenced by natives playing her with stories near the end of her visit when as a restless unfocused student she still didn't know what to write.
In a shelf behind my computer is my copy of The ABC of Flying, Pleiades, London, 1945, I did not buy it new. There is actually no theory given for lift but there is description. There are several plates showing aerofoils in wind tunnels.
I know there are several explanations for lift, some are wrong, they give some intuitive feel as to how there is lift. One explanation, the correct one, did not immediately gain over others. Is this a weakness of engineering, science, aeronautics? It may be said yes, unlike in social studies where the scientific method is taught, discussed, and practiced (pause to retain composure and replace book on shelf).
Quote Engineers in particular suffer from a materialist, anti-intellectual, cookbook curriculum that appeals to religious fanatics. Unquote.
So, are cookbook approaches, tables, charts and numbers used to derive answers instead of proper analysis as used in social studies?
That view is wrong. The cookbook approach shows that there is an established body of knowledge, compressed into easy accessible form, of charts tables and now as apps, for use by technicians and designers. This body of knowledge advances and retreats, as found useful or otherwise. Such applications incorporate assumptions, the technician knows how to use the cookbook, the engineer manager has to know about the assumptions/limitations and, when satisfied, sign-off. This is the professional judgment aspect not seen in vids of people at work, and sadly often missing from job descriptions.
Engineering, science, medicine, biology, and the rest are replete with examples of research, statements, published papers, that are wrong, incompetent, and fraudulent.
For papers the percentage is, what, 20%, 50%? We do not know but we can guess as sometimes it comes out. The mechanisms for checking are poor.
How does this compare with social studies where the scientific method is...etc?
Meaninglessness cannot be checked.
Disaster investigation: There are many appealing aspects of Richard Feynman. His book in which the Challenger investigation is described is fascinating. There is the drama of the experiment done on TV, the careful words, the logic flow. Above all, engineers were used to do the work, to take the blame, but expert engineering advice was over-ruled. Education and interests of those at the top varied, but reality was not the main concern.
Ok I am nearly done.
I'd like to see a list of those few drops of gold.
Make it a new thread, I may be able to put something on!
This statement then refers to the many Jihadists who are engineers and medics.
All B are C, but not all C are B.
and Are engineers trying to convert reality to their religion?
Do engineers care about the religion of reality? Who is this reality that engineers cannot convert?
We confuse the two professions Include me out.
as noted by sociologists Quite so.
Rand knew nothing about the facts in the original post-
I would hope so, at least about so-called facts which are definitions according to anthropologists.
How the motor could work. This implies that engineers need an explanation from anthropology about wanting to solve an engineering problem.
All this time I have been admiring Rand, and Dagny and Reardon, and the many engineers in Atlas Shrugged without the anthropological explanation of their potential as Jihadists.
The comment about Mises is correct and appropriate. Same other free market economists. Mainstream economics, Keynes, is heavy with statistics. Smokescreen with nothing behind.
A good point, no puzzle tho'. It explains.
Their front line innovators are engineers and medics.
Humanities’ graduates are absent from the pool
Obviously, what good are they for anything? Giving orders maybe.
Our governments and opinion leaders are from political science, climate science, ..lawyers, Keynesian economists..
It is not all bad for us, apart from the leadership, who does the work?
The word 'error' does not well describe the work of Margaret Mead.
More like fraud. She gave the results that were expected, behavior that is the rule in that field.
Conversely, Newton had experimental results he could not explain without contravening explanations for other experimental results, he withheld promoting both as correct (even tho' now it may appear to us from evidence this may be the case).
Errors are not acknowledged or corrected but are bypassed as newer fashion overlays the older.
Continuing, the great invention of the Wright Brothers was the propeller. Prandtl aside, no one had a working propeller until the Wrights realized that it is a wing. They pioneered the wind tunnel. They made some mistakes along the way but overall they did marvelous, practical work, apparently without the theoretical understanding that would seem to have been necessary. In fact, the best theoretician of flight of their day was Samuel P. Langley, who put two planes in the Potomac and none in the air. Octave Chanute was a civil engineer who did good, important work on the technques of flight. He build and flew gliders. The Wrights looked to his work as critical to their own. But they invented the propeller. For all of that, they published no peer-reviewed theoretical works on aerodynamics in academic journals.
Aviation is just another example of how science and technology progress, advance, and expand.
If not for marketing, there would be exactly one kind of each thing. (That was what shopping in the USSR was like. They had one theory of social science and one way to apply it.) Human beings are not billiard balls. Sociology cannot be physics. It would be inappropriate on many levels, not the least of which would be coercively experimenting on humans to test theories. Yet marketing is continuous, voluntary experiment.
Colors, shapes, sizes, packaging, arrangement, all of it is the result of social sciences, applied sociology and applied anthropology and applied psychology. The short-comings of university professors who offer wrong-headed theories in social science are not unique to them. You are well-aware of the problems in physics.
As for the engineers, as successful as they are in manipulating a reality that they cannot convert to their religions, they are, nonetheless religious.
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
Scientists are not. We confuse the two professions, but culturally, (as noted by sociologists), science and engineering are different cultures.
Thal all being interesting, you said nothing about the facts cited in the original post, except to point out that Ayn Rand knew nothing about them. People here - including the producers of the movies - have offered theories on how Galt's motor could work. And that seems acceptable. Ask yourself why sometime.
You have not addressed a single point of the original post.
I know that you hate African tribes and Native Americans and all other non-industrial, non-market people. So, I understand that you recoil against any comparisons between our lives and theirs. The fact remains that as a science anthropology identifies facts about cultures and societies. The Valley was a society based on a culture. The "view from the outside" reveals features of that society. Coming from an industrialized, market society, anthropologists recorded the existence of special-purpose money in a different culture. I point out that that feature existed in the artificial society of Atlas Shrugged.. The rest followed by reading definitions of facts from the science of anthropology. If you wish to reject the scientific identifications of the original post, then address them.
Unlike the social sciences' reliance on bad philosophy and its confusion of statistics with scientific conceptual understanding to promote wrong ideas in the name of "science", engineering failures are understood, avoided and corrected using known proper principles. Failures in engineering practice are not comparable to the failures of social science theory, which are fundamental.
Education in the physical sciences incorporates proper principles and methods continuously; it does not treat scientific method as a separate subject, confusing it with statistics, then misapply or ignore it elsewhere.
Serious aerodynamics texts and courses do not present wrong theories,
The explanation of the principles of airfoils using the theory of fluid dynamics was developed by Prandtl over a century ago and has been incorporated, along with increasing subtly and experiments, in textbooks ever since -- for example Glauert's The Elements of Aerofoil and Airscrew Theory, 1926, 2nd ed. 1959.
Dumbed-down "explanations" of aerofoil lift, intended for those who cannot understand the theory and principles of calculation, sometimes substitute incorrect rationalizations; rationalizations are everywhere in the social sciences. Such rationalizations misconstruing aerodynamics are not comparable to the social sciences.
"Engineers in particular" do not "suffer from a materialist, anti-intellectual, cookbook curriculum that appeals to religious fanatics." Engineering is inherently "materialistic" because it deals with the material physical world, which is not "suffering".
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is an example of the destruction, but had nothing to do with the use of the physics in practical applications such as computers. The uncertainty principle, in particular, is a mathematical relationship between Fourier transform pairs, but in its philosophical formulation is only bad philosophy.
"Kahneman and his collaborator, the late Amos Tversky, found by careful sampling that scientists who should know better routinely rely on their intuition and therefore produce research results that have a 50% chance of being wrong."
(Reviewed here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2... )
More to the point, in my undergraduate social science classes, we were all required to take a 200-level class in research methods wherein we each criticized two peer-reviewed publications per week. Nothing like that exists in the physical science curricula, which is why they suffer from periodic embarrassments such as "Plastic Fantastic." Furthermore, in my graduate classes, it was a common complaint that in order to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, you had to provide mountains of statistics. Tom Lehrer made fun of that with his song "Sociology." ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB97Q... ) But it remains that when you discuss populations of people, statistical sampling is an appropriate tool. That being as it may, human beings are not billiard balls. The explanatory modes of physics are not appropriate to the social sciences. Ludwig von MIses's Human Action has no equations. Are free market economists "innumerate twisters of argument"?
here:
"This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists."
https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...
and here:
"... Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent."
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10...
and here:
"These results deconstruct a common myth, that of Islamists as poor ignorant masses: 69% of the surveyed Muslim countries’ nationals went to university. ‘The core of the Islamist movement emerged from would-be elites, not from the poor and the dispossessed’ (p.33). The percentage of engineers among them is 44.9%. It is followed by that of Islamic Studies’ scholars, at around 18%, and then by medicine students with 10% (p.11). Scientists represent a tiny percentage, while Humanities’ graduates are absent from the pool (p.16)."
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2016/05/0...
The point is not to debunk engineering, but to understand why so many here are quick to rebuke the social sciences. The social science explanation is that this is a difference of social orientation, not an argument about demonstrable facts and integrated theories. The errors of Marget Mead or Geoge Boas are no more egregious than Newton's refusal to accept the wave nature of light that his own experiments demonstrated. It does invalidate physics.
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