Comment by beepbooptheory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beepbooptheory | Hacker News Reader

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If the categories here are truly a priori, then it seems strange to mistrust them? Maybe you mean a posteriori?

I think I get the angle here, but the whole thing about a single category/classification/abstraction against a continuum is that it doesn't need to speak to or predict the entire continuum, or to every quality and aspiration of one of its members. One set of things, "those items which have X", need not exclude their members from being in another set which might deal with Y and Z! The concept of a single class, whether we are talking Bertrand Russell or Marx, != complete "taxonomic" classification. As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?

I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?

> As such, a social class is, yes, a lossy abstraction taken from the point of view of any given individual, but it's not like it's failing at being a good category because this is so. That's just, like, how concepts in general work?

Sure. What I'm pointing out is that using the concept of social class as the lens through which you analyze all human social interaction, and draw conclusions about the entire fundamental organization of society, is a case of erroneously universalizing a lossy abstraction.

And when people obsess over social class to the point of characterizing every question, debate, or controversy in society as a manifestation of "class struggle", and criticize people for framing their relations with others in society through some lens other than social class, isn't that clearly what's happening? Isn't that what happened right here in this thread, and led to us having this very debate in the first place?

> I wonder what politics looks like following through with your argument? How do we conceive of things like the "public best interest" if any given classification is doomed to not capture people actually? What is the "public" here? Are there children? Seniors? Veterans?

Well, that's exactly the point. Maybe the answer is that the question doesn't pertain to "the public" as some unified aggregate, but is actually something that different subsets of the public need different approaches to. Maybe the best interest of "the public" aggregated into a singular entity is to to figure out how best to disaggregate the question.

Do you have health insurance?

I do, although in my particular case, I'm on an individual plan and not part of a group plan. But I acknowledge your point that this is one of the few cases where aggregations are a relevant unit of analysis, since the point of insurance is to average out risk within a large set of people.

I will say, though, that this perfectly elucidates my point that classification is a purpose-driven, subjective undertaking -- the classifications used for risk pooling in the insurance industry have nothing at all to do with the model of social class advanced by various polemicists here and elsewhere, due to being devised by different people for different purposes.

If you are using whatever single concept to explain everything, you certainly aren't using it right! No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water though... Like, there is nothing intrinsic to the concept of social class (or, any class) which implies it needs to be used the way you are saying.

Don't we at the very least want to know who might, for whatever reason, not be able to support themselves day to day? So they don't like starve in their homes? Is there at least an answer for that? An aggregate which might past muster?

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