h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Lucinda said "Hmm. Not sure."

Me neither. Whether we can construct a *general* code of conduct for groups I don't know. What I do know is that we must always consider individual (!) cases on their merits, as Xyroth recommended some notes ago.

Pattern-chaser

This post has been removed.

Your strong belief in the individual may be clouding your judgement, Xyroth: "This is because the group (as such) does not exist." It is my belief and experience that groups (of humans) have existed for millennia:
+ sports fans (who support the same team),
+ church congregations (who worship the same gods),
+ commuters (share transport),
+ village communities (share habitat),
+ workers (occupation and employer),
+ blind people (sightlessness),
+ h2g2 researchers (? )
+ and so on.

These are groups, and they act as such. Consider the vocabulary of the football fan: "*We* are the greatest!", "*We've* scored!", "*They* lost!" Identity with the group is sought after, not avoided. This is quite different from an assembly of individuals, IMO.

Your example is interesting, but it is not the normal way in which groups of humans interact. The groups you refer to as collapsing due to lack of input from the membership sound like middle-class British clubs. There's nothing wrong with this, but they aren't typical groups, I don't think.

You started with a view that says the group has no right to dominate the individual, and now you have reached a point where you deny the existence of groups altogether. Surely now is the time to withdraw from the discussion of a topic in which you don't believe?

"I shall await replies to this post with interest, hoping that it wasn't too inflamatory..." It wasn't.

Pattern-chaser

You claim that various of the "groups" below exist, but very few of these actually have any input at all over decisions made about them.
football fans are notorious for moaning about how the club doesn't listen to them, church-goers typically give up their right to choose to the authority figure of the vicar, You only have to look at the current rail and road problems in the UK at the moment to know that commuters have almost no input into the decision making process, workers were represented by unions in the 70's who would bring them out on strike not for the workers interest, but for the unions, and sometimes for the union leaders interest, etc.
in fact, about the only community that you have included in that list at all is the h2g2 researchers, who, like linux users, take an active part in moving the community in various directions and actually influence what choices are made.
Not a particularly good set of examples, were they.
The idea you seem to be talking about is "sets of people who wear a common badge of some sort", which is far short of the sense of community which we are both talking about, and which only comes into being when you get lots of people actively participating in making choices (usually because the previous decision makers were making a complete farce of trying to decide for them).
We are both talking about "people power", but the groups you use as examples have lots of the people, and approximately none of the power.
PS no, they are not middle class british clubs, they are all sort of british (and non british) clubs, from astronomy clubs, to cycling clubs, and it is not just my experience from some little area, it is freinds experience from many different parts of the world.

I think that's precisely the point - if a group moves in the direction that everybody within the group wants it to move, then that's not a group, that's just a bunch of people who happen to be running in the same direction - and would be doing so with or without the existance of a group.

Elections and government are a prime example. If 51% of the population vote Gore, and 49% vote Republican, then you might think that the 49% who are republican should break away and form their own USA - but they don't - because, rightly, they feel that the group is more important than a temporary move that is against their interests.

Of course, in proxy-based government you have a better chance - 'representative' democracy can easily suffer from all the problems of special interest groups and so forth.

You mention elections as a good example of groups. In most recent elections in established democracies, you have the situation where you get only 20-30 percent of the vote deciding who won. the problem is, that only 50% or less of actually bother to vote, because over the years, political parties of all sides have rigged the system to have "safe seats" so that if you are in thoseareas, your vote doesn't matter. In other areas, you only have the choice from 2 of the many parties contesting the election, and if you don't like either, your vote doesn't matter. this all leads to voters stopping voting, and adds to the general level of alienation and exclusion that causes so much trouble today. Most voting systems would benefit from the inclusion of "none of the above" on the balet paper, with the parties not having to get so many votes to keep their deposit, but having to get more votes than voted for none of the above.
when you get 23-30% of the 30-60% who voted deciding wo runs the show, then by definition you have not got a democratically elected government, and therefore you have not got a group. unless all members of the group are exually important in deciding things,you get lots of problems down the line.

You missed a reason not to vote - if you like both parties, then there's no reason to vote... incidentally, you can have a group without having democracy - a pack of wolves is a group too.

As I alluded to earlier, in any case representative democracy is really rather dire - the fact that most people don't vote is less of a problem. Much better are proxy systems, like those used at AGMs and so forth. *sigh* it'll never happen.

Proxy systems are just as dire as representative democracies, and are just as open to abuse. The greeks had the right idea, in their city states. As they were participatory democrasies, when their emergency representatives on the city council made a deal for a subjugational surrender to an invader, they were collected up, and given a very short time to get out of town via the people who they had surrendered to. They had to tell them that the surrender was off.

>>You claim that various of the "groups" below exist, but very few of these actually have any input at all over decisions made about them.<<

Are you saying that it is a defining characteristic of a group that its membership should have input "over decisions made about them"? The way a group takes its decisions is a matter for the group, which may or may not consult its membership while it considers the matter.

In animal society, the group dominates by force of numbers - might makes right. I do not suggest this as a slogan for human groups, but I put it forward for consideration as the historical basis of group behaviour, where we (the human species) started a long time ago.

The family and the tribe (extended family?) are two other examples of groups. They act as groups, and they sometimes over-rule the wishes of individuals for the good of the group.

>>You only have to look at the current rail and road problems in the UK at the moment to know that commuters have almost no input into the decision making process<< But this is silliness! We elect them to do just this kind of thing for us, because there are so many things to do we can't all take part in all of them. Our input is the vote we cast (or not).

This debate is about greed and selfishness (I want to drive, not walk, regardless of the future impact on the environment...) which makes it difficult for the politician who tries to recommend a sustainable course. He may not get voted back in. But this is just a detailed example of how group dynamics are anythhing but simple, and doesn't bear directly on what we're talking about.

>>Not a particularly good set of examples, were they.<< Actually, yes, they were. All of them are groups, they act as groups, and few of them display the defining characteristic that *you say* groups ought to have - participation only by unanimous consent.

I didn't realise we had made our definition of "group" in any way specific. I have not mentioned a sense of community (desirable though that might be) or active participation in decision making. You have added these to the discussion yourself. It's no wonder we're having such dificulty understanding one another's notions.

Pattern-chaser

Well spotted. I hadn't noticed that.
having said that, for any set of individuals to set out to exclude individuals, and then punish them for behaving accordingly is pattently silly, but this is what government does.
As regards to "this is why we elect them, it's too complex", that has a simple solution, you have open availability of the information needed to make a descision, and any individual can vote on any policy issue that a simple online questionare shows that he (or she) is competant to hold an opinion on.
As regards the fact that we would all be making descisions all of the time, so lets get someone else to make them for us, that also has a simple answer. in the open source software community you have hundreds of programs being worked on and improved all of the time, and the way they deal with the same problem is to have local descision making by the people closest to the work, with others comming in to do work on that (or other) project(s) if they have anything helpful to add. people stay out of the way of descisions until they are unhappy about the trend, and then they get involved and actively persue suggestions and good ideas to try and improve it.
An example of this working in industry is desilu studios working in 1967-69 on the star trek programme, where they managed to have every individual in the entirecast and crew offering good ideas to make the show better and more believable, while at the same time bringing in a tv show that were doing more things than most movies, faster, cheaper, and mostly better. They also had an ESPRIT de CORPS that was absolutely unbeleivable to the military consultantsthat they had working with the show.

> "As regards to "this is why we elect them, it's too complex", that has a simple solution, you have open availability of the information needed to make a descision, and any individual can vote on any policy .... As regards the fact that we would all be making descisions all of the time, so lets get someone else to make them for us...."

Uh, xyroth - you just gave a perfect definition of a proxy-based democracy... I thought you said they didn't work?

Would I be *very* wrong if I observed that a lot of what you are writing about is what you would *like* to happen, rather than what has happened? I note your Star Trek example, but isn't it the exception that proves the rule?

Groups just don't work as you describe them, and I think the reason is that the vast majority of group members don't *want* to be activists. They are pleased for someone else to take the task on for them. I am pleased for politicians to act on my behalf, so that I can pursue software design. This is a benefit of group membership.

>>...for any set of individuals to set out to exclude individuals, and then punish them for behaving accordingly is patently silly, but this is what government does.<<

I don't fully understand what you're getting at here, but I would observe that you're still missing the point when you refer to a "set of individuals". Pedantically the term is correct, but isn't a *group* qualitatively different from a "set of individuals"? I think it is. A group is greater than the sum of its parts; it has existence (of a sort) in its own right.

It is quite clear to me now that there will be no Entry on ethical conflict between groups and individuals from you and I. Our dialogue has that unmistakeable quality that says our views are too disparate to be reconciled. Thanks for an interesting discussion anyway.

Pattern-chaser

you're welcome. by the way, I am using the term "set" in the mathematical sense, whereas "group" has an additional set of connotations on top of this.
If a proxy democracy is what I described, rather than a "representative democracy" (like parliaments the world over) then I will accept the term quete readily, however i have only heard it used to describe representative democracy.
The star trek example used is not used because i would like things to be like that, it is used as the best example of those methods working, when everyone else said that what they wanted to do was impossible. for comparison, a rival network tricked roddenberry into revealing how he intended to make the show cheap enough to produce, and the best that they could come up with using the standard hierachical model of business was "lost in space" which doesn't hold a candle to star trek in any comparison.
I have also noted that some of the most successful businesses already approximate to using a watered down form of this set of techniques, and arereapingthe profits from it. Without the sense of inclusion that some minimum required set of interactions produces, all you haveis a (mathematical) set of individuals, not a community. in difficult times this seems to show up, and the communities survive by pulling together, whereas mathematical sets of people who are pidgeon holed on only one or two properties seem to fall apart due to the disparity between the ease of leaving versus the value of staying.

PS I suspect that a lot of the problems are not down to entirely different world views, but to a lach of mutually agreeable definitions, and if we can find some, we may be able to resolve some of the problems.

I use "set" in the mathematical sense, analagous to group selected for the presence or absense of some property.
I use "group" sparingly if at all, due to the total lack off common meaning between individuals. no one seems to define it the same way as anyone else.
I use "community" to describe a set of individuals joined together by a sense of ownership of the set, usually requiring inclusivity to get that sense of ownership of the group or the set.
If you have any other definitions that fall between them, then please post them, and we can try to come up with some common terms, and from that, some similar beliefs.
In my opinion the problem of the group vs the individual comes about when you take a "set" of individuals selected for some property (any property like being black, white, redhead, boston united supporters, etc) and endow upon that group the rights of the community, without it actually being a community.
for the "community" to haveany rights at all over the individual, either the community or the individual must be able to seperate from the other, and the individual must have thatsense of ownership of the community.
This is why the "linux" community is a community of individuals, some of which can write programmes, most of which can offer suggestions for improvements that won't be dismissed out of hand, and might even get implimented in the project. The important point about this community is that although no individual decides the fate of the entire community, the community is driven by the common goals of the individuals who influence the new shape of the community tomorrow by making choices of which software to run, and if none of it does what they need, they can take the source code, and modify it to produce a new programme which will be more like they need it to be. If they can't programme, the source code is there for them to pay someone else to modify. either way, a new programme emerges, which then takes it's place in the collection of programmes that the community uses, and if it is generally usefull (to either the population in general,or to a special interest group) then it will continue to grow and improve until it in turn is replaced by a better programme.