https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cudix/21st_ce...

If you take "worldview" to be the aggregate of models, premises, axioms, rules-of-thumb, personal and cultural context, etc., etc., you end up with a pretty hairy melenge of crud.

Some of it is useful and accurate. A lot of it isn't. (All models are wrong, some are useful.) Almost all of it has very strong path dependencies. Language itself is problematic as we define things in terms of other things, and if all the ground is soft and/or unstable, then that shifts.

I'm looking at ideas involving progress, models, institutions, limits, and interactions among them. I've been thinking for a while of adding "values" to that list as well.

There are large constraints in discussing this with others, particularly as much of the thinking is novel (though as I dig through dusty and rusty corners I'm finding I'm reinventing a lot of ideas previously considered -- something I find heartening), but moreso, that those who hold the mainstream worldview are heavily vested in it.

There's an as-yet-unwritten essay on apocalyptic thinking. Not in the sense of fire-from-the-sky the world will explode meaning, but in that the roots of the words "revelation", "enlightenment", "apocalypse", "catastrophe", and "revolution", among others, refer to an overturning. "The scales dropped from my eyes". There's a Cupertino mystic I bumped across online (no, not Steve Jobs) who has a really expressive little bit that enlightenment is not in the least comforting. Or to borrow from Arthur C. Clarke's title -- it's a childhood's end.

Solidifying a bit, I'm finding the ecologists far more convincing and reality-based than (most of) the economists. Howard Odum, William Ophuls, Vaclav Smil, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (economist), Herman Daly (ecological economist). But the roots of economic thought, in particular 18th and 19th century, are also pretty fascinating. There's Steuart (almost wholly ignored by Smith), and as a recently discovered example, T. E. Cliffe Leslie, "The Political Economy of Adam Smith" (1870), which does an excellent job of expressing what I've been trying to put my finger on about economics (and all philosophy) being grounded in specific circumstances.

http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/leslie/leslie01.ht...

No branch of philosophical doctrine, indeed, can be fairly investigated or apprehended apart from its history. All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas. And the history of political economy, at any rate, is not lost. It would not be difficult to trace the connection between every extant treatise prior to the `Wealth of Nations,' and conditions of thought at the epoch at which it appeared. But there is the less occasion, for the purpose of these pages, or of ascertaining the origin and foundation of the economic doctrines of our own day, to go behind the epoch of Adam Smith, that he has himself traced the systems of political economy antecedent to his own to a particular course of history, to `the different progress of opulence in different ages and nations,' and `the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men.' What he did not see was, that his own system, in its turn, was the product of a particular history; that what he regarded as the System of Nature was a descendant of the System of Nature as conceived by the ancients, in a form fashioned by the ideas and circumstances of his own time, and. coloured by his own disposition and course of life. Still less could he see how, after his time, `the progress of opulence' would govern the interpretation of his doctrines, or how the system he promulgated as the system of liberty, justice, and divine benevolence, would be moulded into a system of selfishness by `the private interests and prejudices of particular orders of men.'

Also claimed is that Smith is entirely deductive. I'm not so convinced of this (Smith actually does cite observations and behaviour frequently), though it is true in parts, and most true in those parts of Smith that are most widely and loudly championed today, particularly the wholly fabricated notion that an "Invisible Hand" is some mechanism by which markets operate. It's not mechanism but apparent outcome, an outcome, it turns out from much subsequent studies. fantastically sensitive to actual conditions, and not in the least guaranteed. (See epecially Joseph Stiglitz.)

Anyhow, small bits. But yes, I'm running an abattoir for sacred cows and received truths.

The linked subbreddit (above) is where I'm exploring much of that. Conversation spills out in other places, including HN.