Questions for the surprisingly far right CFC population

[Sommerswerd]

Why are production/wealth/success/progress/etc an indicator of being "better" at all? That is not the point of communism. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." It is about balance, and freedom from the oppression of competitive systems. It is not designed to outproduce capitalist systems. It is designed to reduce human suffering. It was never fully realized, and what was realized did not last. The people in the end were not content with the mere reduction of their suffering, because after a few generations they were no longer aware of such suffering. They wanted more.

This is probably going to end up following a wave-like pattern where communist-like (socialist, social democratic) societies keep emerging and de-emerging. Maybe in the end, the world will decide to converge toward a less competitive way of life.

I had to read this a couple times to get what you were saying, (Farm Boy liking got my attention) but once I did I realized what a great point you make. Thanks for that perspective, I think its much more productive... pardon the pun.

 

[aelf]

An important part of that is the environment in which we developed as a species. Heuristic shortcuts were useful for the relatively shallow cognitive environments in which we dwelled for the better part of our existence. With the rise of complex civilizations and now cyberspace, our tools have become wholly inadequate and often counter-productive. Neuroscience is peeling away the layers of our complexity and exposing our cognitive 'crash spaces' with alarming speed, which has not gone unnoticed by various corporations and governmental departments. It's why I have grave doubts about any kind of meaningful democratic order surviving by the end of the century.

Hmm, I don't quite agree. There's still a lot of ambiguity in a modern environment, for which heuristic shortcuts serve us well. Take the market, for example. It's probably beyond the capability of anything now to accurately predict every movement of the market. Maybe there's just too much information to be processed, but part of it is also because movement of the market depends on human activity, which is not necessarily predictable (e.g. trading algorithms were suspended in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote for fear that the automated systems would make major mistakes). Such an environment still requires us to use heuristic shortcuts often to make decisions, and I think it's possible to be good enough to at using these shortcuts to make non-bad decisions the majority of the time.

Yeah, it's a similar problem as the one I described I think. When designing an AI system we have to program in desired outcomes, so that the system knows what to strive for. But humans have evolved all this via a bottom-up approach instead of the top-down approach most AI systems try to use. So it's very hard to replicate and build a system which can learn, without you explicitly telling it what outcomes you are looking for (which would be a top-down approach). I read an article a while ago (or maybe it was a book?) that feeding this data through a series of neural networks can allow a system to learn how to learn. It was very rudimentary though and the examples given were very simple. So I'm not sure where we're at with this sort of research these days, but I'd bet we are still far away from constructing a complex mind that can learn how to learn.

I think your point actually has different premises and implications. I think it's accurate to say that it has to do with the architecture of the brain, while mine is concerned more with mental models. And what you say implies a certain form of Physicalism, which posits that the way we think is inextricably linked to our physical makeup in some way. What I'm saying doesn't go that far - I believe that even if machines don't have neural networks as such, it's still possible for them to replicate the way we think by replicating the way we learn. However, what I believe goes further in a certain way, in that it posits that sensorimotor learning (e.g. through some form of feedback mechanism comparable to our nervous system) is necessary, requiring these machines to have bodies of some form that make this possible.

Of course, what I presume we're discussing is how to replicate human thought. As I suggested earlier, I think it's possible for AI to be truly intelligent without it thinking exactly like us.

Anyway, to bring this somewhat on-topic, I think AI can perhaps perform all our labour for us and thereby truly free us from the demands of labour as a means of survival - communism by technology, so to speak. Or, by creating unprecedented unemployment under a capitalistic system, it can create conditions desperate enough to spark widespread revolution. Another possibility is the advent of transhumanism freeing us from the human condition and causing us to be able to reconfigure our society in ways that we can't now.

 

[Kozmos]

Hmm, I don't quite agree. There's still a lot of ambiguity in a modern environment, for which heuristic shortcuts serve us well. Take the market, for example. It's probably beyond the capability of anything now to accurately predict every movement of the market. Maybe there's just too much information to be processed, but part of it is also because movement of the market depends on human activity, which is not necessarily predictable (e.g. trading algorithms were suspended in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote for fear that the automated systems would make major mistakes). Such an environment still requires us to use heuristic shortcuts often to make decisions, and I think it's possible to be good enough to at using these shortcuts to make non-bad decisions the majority of the time.

My concern is not with the efficiency of heuristics, but their vulnerability. Heuristics can be exploited and already is by marketing and soon the emerging field of neuromarketing. Consider the ease of how many men were lured to their demise by Ashley Madison, a website that relied on a large amount of barebone bot accounts to prod users into staying by offering simulations of romantic interest. The way casinos use faint odors, just the right amount of lights and other sounds to keep people inside longer. The way clickbait and emotional appeals totally ruin our judgment, political affiliation destroys our capacity for rational reasoning. You meet someone and they give you a warm drink, you form a perception of them being a warm person. The human brain is an unpatched Windows 2000 running in a 2017 threat environment.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Not trying to start discussions, just looking for some reasoning from capitalists, and I don't know many in the real world so I'm forced to come here, where capitalists seem to grow on trees.

Which step do you think doesn't logically follow for each thing?

Thing 1: On Problems
(0/Given: the global economic system at the moment can be defined as fundamentally capitalistic.)
1. Economics is the primary driving force of all developments in human society-- cultural conventions, political and social structures, belief systems, etc.

Wrong. Economics is more the means for allocating resources against competing demands.
The driving for the demand for resources (e.g. food, water) are biological. Curiousity drives developments.

2. Therefore, all/most aspects of a society are drawn from economic factors.

I play chess with adults. I play dominos with my son. I go out for a walk for exercise.
As much as possible of my life is not about economics and money.

3. This includes problems.

I cannot solve a Rubic cube. That is a problem. It is not economics.
If you have arguments with your partner, there may be a problem. That is not economics.

4. Because of the given, we can therefore reason that the world's problems are the result of capitalistic economic structures.

Which evil capitalist made that earthquake?

Thing 2: On Values
(0/Given: The conceptual rights a human being should have, in an ideal society, should reflect human need.)
1. Law is a construct; this construct should reflect the rights that a society agrees human beings should have.[/QUOTE}

Only partly true. In general laws existed to minimise conflict. Others such as IPR were originally about
developing innovation and maintaining quality. As such laws were based on pragmatism not ideals.

2. Only when these rights can first and foremost reflect human need are met should law extend beyond human need.
3. When laws protect the ability to restrict human need, they fail to fulfill the rights of humanity.
4. Therefore laws that restrict human need should be changed to reflect human rights, which in an ideal society reflect human need.

Thing 3: On Action
(0/Given: Preventing systems of oppression is more important than preserving order or peace in situations in which that oppression breeds more violence or damage than would be required to prevent it)

1. A setting in which there are people with more power than others is a hierarchy.
2. Hierarchies are oppressive by definition.

Having more or less power than somone else is not necessarily oppressive.
People are unequal. Hierachies are inevitable.

3. Hierarchies are resistant to their own destruction as is natural to anything.
4. Therefore, change through the network of the oppressive hierarchy is impossible.

Being resistant to destruction is not the same thing as being resistant to change.
Hierarchies inevitably change for one reason or other.

5. Given the above, however, change is still preferred under the assumption that it will not be more destructive than the hierarchy itself, and therefore, assuming it is not, action against the system of oppression is preferable to inaction or continued attempts at changing the hierarchy from within.

This is all very theoretical and involves the assumption that the future can be known
e.g. consider what would happen if a time traveller killed Hitler?.

 

[Cutlass]

If we can debate that, I will debate. You are comparing apples to oranges and drawing a wrong conclusion. The USSR did not had the same resouces and population available (not to mention the initial technical gap) as the "west" opposed to it. Productivity does not exist in a void, it depends on availability of inputs.

What you can compare comparatively more fairly (albeit it is still a flawed comparison) is communist Russia and capitalist Russia. And in that comparison the capitalist one fails. Has it even now, 27 years later, caught up with the level of the old USSR in its last, supposedly declining, days? It is true that in the meanwhile Russia lost its "empire" and the resources from it, so the economic collapse after 1989 can be excused. But after these decades how does its average citizen fare economically?

The narrative that the collapse was economic was convenient for both the ideologues of the left (it absolved the ideology from blame) and of the right (it legitimized its ideology of we may be unequal buy we make it up by having the "best economy"). The real causes of the collapse were more political than economic imho. But I don't what to derail this thread to discuss the last years of the USSR.

That isn't really true. The population of the USSR in 1950 was 30million people greater than the population of the US at the same time. As for other resources, no nation ever has had superior national natural resources than the USSR. Now many of those resources were remote, and fairly difficult and costly to access. But it's just wrong to claim that they didn't have more. They had everything. Even moreso than the US, because the US had to import many strategic resources.

Now there is the technical gap. However as of 1945 the USSR had access to virtually all of the technology of the Allied powers through Lend-Lease. So they had the resources, they had the tech. What they did not have is the capital investment, this is true. But that could be gained. And they did come up with the capital. I won't go into the cost of doing so, but they did. To quote myself from another part of the web:

It would take a book or more to really explain what went wrong. I'll try to tl:dr, but it'll still be a little on the long side.

Marx did not leave behind any blueprint on what communism needed to be. Nor did he leave any road map on how to get there. So right from the start there were too many missing pieces. And many of the pieces they did have were wrong. Particularly in not understanding the roles of money, prices, markets, and services in the economy. Simply put, there was too much focus on physical goods. And too much assumption of communism arising in an industrialized nation among an industrial proletariat. Guess what? 1918 Russia was not an industrialized, or really even an industrializing, nation. It was a peasant agricultural nation not even fully removed from outright serfdom.

So you kill the czar and his ministers, and as many of the other nobles you can catch, and what have you got left? Peasant farmers. Peasant farmers was not what Marx was talking about for a communist revolution. What's a Lenin or Stalin to do?

I'll fast forward past most of the forced industrialization to after WWII. This, for the point of our narrative, is where Soviet development policy really started to go wrong. You see, the Soviets could, and did, copy a lot of technology from the industrialized powers. This is a latecomers advantage that many nations have used. China has been using it for the past 20 years or so. What it means is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, if you can see an actual wheel, see it in use, see how it is made, and so forth. There is no need to invent and implement each of the intermediary steps. This saves tons of time and effort and investment. So the 1940s and 50s were times of really great growth for the USSR. They went all the way from 17th century peasant agriculture to 1940s industrialization in the 4 decades after the revolution. That's a huge explosion in labor productivity.

And then they more or less just stopped.

You can have the best 1940s era tractor factory in the world, but if it's 1970, then it's obsolete. This is where the theories of Joseph Schumpeter show the difference. Creative destruction means that when you create something new, something old is displaced by it. The old is destroyed by the new. This applies to both product and process! In market economy nations labor productivity continued to grow. Because the factories and the products they produced were continually improved. In the USSR, they had a working tractor factory, job done. A man could get out of the Red Army in 1945 and go to work in a tractor factory and in 1975 he would be doing exactly the same job in exactly the same factory with exactly the same tools producing exactly the same product. Except that now all of them are old and worn out.

And that is why that once the Soviets had gotten everyone off the farm and into the factories that they could, there was no more growth to be had.

Now to add to their problems, they never did get the kind of agricultural productivity that Western nations did. And so they couldn't get as many workers off the farms. And they never did fully develop their transportation infrastructure, so they didn't even get the food that they did grow to market. In the 1970s the USSR, the nation with had the largest amount of premier grain growing area in the world, was dependent on grain imports from the United States.

So their agricultural productivity was stagnated. Their industrial productivity was stagnated. Their transportation was underdeveloped. Their services were underdeveloped. The why of it all was a leadership which was ideological in the beginning, but just became more conservative and corrupt with time. They did not continue to develop. Development is a permanent process. It is always ongoing. And they just never got that.

What economists call total factor productivity is how that continued growth of productivity is figured. But the USSR never had that, after initial industrialization. The same worker in an American factory would be using new tools and new training on a redesigned production line producing a new and better designed tractor. And then getting it to market in a much more efficient way.

But the big difference is that TFP in the Soviet Union actually fell by an annual average of 1% over 30 years to 1988.

http://www.economist.com/node/14844987

Now Russia post-Soviet hasn't done well either. And there are many reasons for that. Including government corruption and a really ugly demographics situation. Per capita income in the US today is above $57,000. In Russia it's about $9000. And the Russian population now is well under half what the USSR's population was. Most of the decline representing former parts of the USSR now not being part of Russia.

 

[innonimatu]

That isn't really true. The population of the USSR in 1950 was 30million people greater than the population of the US at the same time. As for other resources, no nation ever has had superior national natural resources than the USSR. Now many of those resources were remote, and fairly difficult and costly to access. But it's just wrong to claim that they didn't have more. They had everything. Even moreso than the US, because the US had to import many strategic resources.

Remoteness was indeed a big minus. As was the harsh climate of most of the territory (and till is). There were in fact very few resources that the US lacked in its "homeland" where we can inlude the close ally Canada, making it as big as the USSR. The sole one that comes to mind is titanium, and only for a while.

Besides North America the US and its european allies had most of the world available to them, the broken bits of the old european empires. Even at the time when the non-aligned movement and the soviet block were at their greatest extension (1970s).
Some people got scared in the west during that decade, they really believed in the "domino theory" and a need to plot coups around the third world. India was too big to receive that treatment (and too close to the USSR, but Iran, Indonesia, etc did. And the western alliance retained control over most of those resources. The USSR, hampered by "costlier" home resources at home and lack of control over the seas, was no match to the global reach of the US alliance.

TFP is dark matter for economists.

 

[Lexicus]

TFP is dark matter for economists.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite (economist-authored) blog posts of all time:

Whenever I hear an economist use the word “efficiency” (or “productivity”), I can guess with near 100% accuracy that he (it usually is a he, as I’ll explain below) hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about. With rare exceptions, he is inappropriately applying an engineering term to an economic process he does not understand.

 

[metatron]

Which step do you think doesn't logically follow for each thing?

Thing 1: On Problems
(0/Given: the global economic system at the moment can be defined as fundamentally capitalistic.)
1. Economics is the primary driving force of all developments in human society-- cultural conventions, political and social structures, belief systems, etc.
2. Therefore, all/most aspects of a society are drawn from economic factors.
3. This includes problems.
4. Because of the given, we can therefore reason that the world's problems are the result of capitalistic economic structures.

Thing 2: On Values
(0/Given: The conceptual rights a human being should have, in an ideal society, should reflect human need.)
1. Law is a construct; this construct should reflect the rights that a society agrees human beings should have.
2. Only when these rights can first and foremost reflect human need are met should law extend beyond human need.
3. When laws protect the ability to restrict human need, they fail to fulfill the rights of humanity.
4. Therefore laws that restrict human need should be changed to reflect human rights, which in an ideal society reflect human need.

Thing 3: On Action
(0/Given: Preventing systems of oppression is more important than preserving order or peace in situations in which that oppression breeds more violence or damage than would be required to prevent it)
1. A setting in which there are people with more power than others is a hierarchy.
2. Hierarchies are oppressive by definition.
3. Hierarchies are resistant to their own destruction as is natural to anything.
4. Therefore, change through the network of the oppressive hierarchy is impossible.
5. Given the above, however, change is still preferred under the assumption that it will not be more destructive than the hierarchy itself, and therefore, assuming it is not, action against the system of oppression is preferable to inaction or continued attempts at changing the hierarchy from within.

Thing 1.
Item 0 and item 1 are both premises and both faulty. Human motivations are partially inate and we live in mixed economies.
Well i do anyway. If you are by chance American you may make the case that you live in a thoroughly screwed up mixed economy, but that's about it.

Thing 2.
Item 0 makes my flinch quite a bit on account of obnoxious language, but as far as i can deduce actual meaning from that mess i agree with it.
Item 1: Yes, and GG 1.1 implicitly says so.
Item 2: Ostensibly all laws address some such need. I'd prefer to argue that some of those supposed needs are frivolous or trivial or that the laws addressing them lack proportionality.
Item 3: I am not even a native speaker but this, i am sure, is where the English language throws in the towel.

Thing 3.
Item 0: Yes, and GG 20.1 implicitly says so.
Item 1: No.
Item 2: No.
Item 3: Not exclusively, but usually, granted.

Generally speaking, "ideal society" is something that has to be approximated. And something that has to be built.
It is not revealed by merely tearing down bad "systems".
Under the cobblestones is no beach (as it were), just dirt; besides the beach is a suck place to live to begin with.

That's the sort of ideology that tells people to stop watering their lawn during a drought while the real reason for water scarcity is large agricultural corporations depleting ground water for profit.

It tries to prevent solutions to collective problems that can only be solved through collective action by rephrasing the problem into individual moral decisions. People who want to fix systemic problems are always asked to "lead by example", even though usually leading by example does not address the problem at all, and is generally ignored or even ridiculed.

Well, in the most recent such event in California "the media" may have on occasion shown someone in Compton standing on their front... dirt.
But mostly "the media" were busy interviewing, at times demandingly, fat fracks on shiny green lawn with holes in it.

So i see your point in theory, but feel that there's some mismatch between that and observable practice.

 

[inthesomeday]

Thing 1.
Item 0 and item 1 are both premises and both faulty. Human motivations are partially inate and we live in mixed economies.
Well i do anyway. If you are by chance American you may make the case that you live in a thoroughly screwed up mixed economy, but that's about it.

A "mixed economy" doesn't exist because there are no longer contained national economies, and the global economy is definitely capitalistic; the collective economic elites of all the world are definitely exploiting everybody and everything else for their own power, regardless of if that power is always in the form of pieces of paper or coins. And the only innate motivations are biological ones, which on a large enough scale containing a large enough number of humans can get boiled down to a desire for resources for analysis purposes.

Thing 2.
Item 0 makes my flinch quite a bit on account of obnoxious language, but as far as i can deduce actual meaning from that mess i agree with it.
Item 1: Yes, and GG 1.1 implicitly says so.
Item 2: Ostensibly all laws address some such need. I'd prefer to argue that some of those supposed needs are frivolous or trivial or that the laws addressing them lack proportionality.
Item 3: I am not even a native speaker but this, i am sure, is where the English language throws in the towel.

So you agree, then? If you need clarification I can supply it but I don't see a disagreement here.

Thing 3.
Item 0: Yes, and GG 20.1 implicitly says so.
Item 1: No.
Item 2: No.
Item 3: Not exclusively, but usually, granted.

Then how do you define a hierarchy? And how are they not oppressive by nature?

Generally speaking, "ideal society" is something that has to be approximated. And something that has to be built.
It is not revealed by merely tearing down bad "systems".
Under the cobblestones is no beach (as it were), just dirt; besides the beach is a suck place to live to begin with.

I agree! So are you in, then?

 

[metatron]

So you agree, then? If you need clarification I can supply it but I don't see a disagreement here.

Well, kind of. If you take all the dubious sappy stuff out of it.

Then how do you define a hierarchy? And how are they not oppressive by nature?

Well, i suppose what you want to talk about here is authority, not hierarchy (any halfway decent lexical definition of hierarchy pretty much wipes your argument).
And authority can be earned instead of imposed. And sometimes it can be imposed with justification.
A parent drawing back a kids hand half the way to the hot stove, or some larger authority using force to protect basic rights (say arresting the guy who is trying to kill you).
What this whole Thing2 has to be about is the validity of laws as per Item 2.1.
But i feel somewhere between item 2.2 and 2.3 the argument goes off the rails, largely as a result of attempted... ideology. And consequently Thing3 ends up sort of mismatching, in my view anyway.

Alas i got to be out and about now. So, a long delay on further response on my part is not meant as an indication of disinterest.

 

[Lexicus]

Not trying to start discussions, just looking for some reasoning from capitalists, and I don't know many in the real world so I'm forced to come here, where capitalists seem to grow on trees.

Which step do you think doesn't logically follow for each thing?

Thing 1: On Problems
(0/Given: the global economic system at the moment can be defined as fundamentally capitalistic.)
1. Economics is the primary driving force of all developments in human society-- cultural conventions, political and social structures, belief systems, etc.
2. Therefore, all/most aspects of a society are drawn from economic factors.
3. This includes problems.
4. Because of the given, we can therefore reason that the world's problems are the result of capitalistic economic structures.

I reject 1. Economic determinism is essential to liberalism and its offshoots including orthodox Marxism. But it also seems to me to be obviously wrong.

 

[onejayhawk]

Hmm, I don't quite agree. There's still a lot of ambiguity in a modern environment, for which heuristic shortcuts serve us well. Take the market, for example. It's probably beyond the capability of anything now to accurately predict every movement of the market. Maybe there's just too much information to be processed, but part of it is also because movement of the market depends on human activity, which is not necessarily predictable (e.g. trading algorithms were suspended in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote for fear that the automated systems would make major mistakes). Such an environment still requires us to use heuristic shortcuts often to make decisions, and I think it's possible to be good enough to at using these shortcuts to make non-bad decisions the majority of the time.



I think your point actually has different premises and implications. I think it's accurate to say that it has to do with the architecture of the brain, while mine is concerned more with mental models. And what you say implies a certain form of Physicalism, which posits that the way we think is inextricably linked to our physical makeup in some way. What I'm saying doesn't go that far - I believe that even if machines don't have neural networks as such, it's still possible for them to replicate the way we think by replicating the way we learn. However, what I believe goes further in a certain way, in that it posits that sensorimotor learning (e.g. through some form of feedback mechanism comparable to our nervous system) is necessary, requiring these machines to have bodies of some form that make this possible.

Of course, what I presume we're discussing is how to replicate human thought. As I suggested earlier, I think it's possible for AI to be truly intelligent without it thinking exactly like us.

Anyway, to bring this somewhat on-topic, I think AI can perhaps perform all our labour for us and thereby truly free us from the demands of labour as a means of survival - communism by technology, so to speak. Or, by creating unprecedented unemployment under a capitalistic system, it can create conditions desperate enough to spark widespread revolution. Another possibility is the advent of transhumanism freeing us from the human condition and causing us to be able to reconfigure our society in ways that we can't now.

You still have to deal with the fact that the only time communism has worked it has been in a survival stressed environment. If every decision has life/death implications, selfishness is quashed. Allow a little breathing room and avarice flourishes, which manifests as corruption and sloth. The whole system breaks down.

J

 

[Sommerswerd]

If every decision has life/death implications, selfishness is quashed.

Isn't it actually the converse? Wouldn't selfishness be magnified in a situation where your very survival is on the line? It would seem that in times of scarcity, selfishness/greed is encouraged whereas in times of plenty, generosity, cooperation and sharing are encouraged.

Or maybe what you are trying to say is that when you are completely dependent on others for survival, you are more likely to cooperate with others in order to ensure your own survival?

 

[Farm Boy]

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html

The reason baboons are such good models is, like us, they don't have real stressors," he said. "If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other.

The bucket of crabs is in a worse position yet.

 

[Lexicus]

Isn't it actually the converse? Wouldn't selfishness be magnified in a situation where your very survival is on the line? It would seem that in times of scarcity, selfishness/greed is encouraged whereas in times of plenty, generosity, cooperation and sharing are encouraged.

Historically, societies on the material margin of survival were not particularly tolerant of individualism (including individual greed).

 

[Snorrius]

Those "givens" are not given.

 

[Farm Boy]

Historically, societies on the material margin of survival were not particularly tolerant of individualism (including individual greed).

The salt of the earth?

 

[Lexicus]

Maybe. I'm no Biblical scholar or anything close to it, so you'll have to explain the relevance here I'm afraid.

 

[Farm Boy]

I guess by linking the whole wiki-page I was watching the biblical interpretations and translations morph into the secularized, and near the end of the page:

The modern usage of the phrase is somewhat separate from its scriptural origins. Today it refers to someone who is humble and lacking pretension.

There's not much time for pretension when the wheat needs sown and the clothes need sewn. It's different when all there is to do is sit around all day and worry about what is one's own.

If there is nothing to do that is more important than focusing on being important?

I suppose we could go full Proverbs 16:27-29. But I wouldn't like it as much without the discussion that lead up to its potential relevance.

Edit: sorry these edits take so long. I wind up pissing around with finding the links that translate differently.

 

[Lexicus]

There's not much time for pretentsion when the wheat needs sown and the clothes need sewn. It's different when you can sit around all day and worry about what's owned.

It's interesting you use such imagery because I was referring to non-agricultural societies.