Let's start with an example. When trying to understand a government, first imagine your ideal government. Work out a whole blueprint. Every detail you can muster the attention for. Look at how the components interact with each other and work out any inconsistencies, allowing your ideal to become more ideal. In other words, saturday's post.
Then compare it to the actual government. Why does real physical government differ from my ideal?
Sometimes, it helps you refine your ideal, as you can see from the working example that your design wouldn't work. Why can't individuals band together in a fractal mutual-defence accord? Because they're too dumb. They will constantly try to push the costs of war off on each other, resulting in more in-fighting than out-fighting, and consequently losing the war. This alliance is in fact ludicrous - the cognitive costs of a working design far exceed the cognitive budget of the mortals in question.
Why can't you fire the king? Because the king is a parasite, and deserves to be fired. Would have been fired long ago if he hadn't pre-emptively de-legitimized prosecution of parasitism. Ah, that was easy.
By comparing to an ideal, you can upgrade from a vague, "This doesn't seem right," to a detailed account of what went wrong and why. Or, as with military alliances, sometimes you learn it is right.
Why are there separation of powers? Because division of labour. A king, no matter how great, has limited capacity for excellence. To get excellence elsewhere, you need a second king.
But, uh, having two kings and one kingdom is retarded. Whoops. A good idea, extremely poorly executed. At least go for king vs. pope...and the powers should not be separate, per se.
Why is the catholic pope a pile of shit? Because the church is organized completely back-assward. It would be weird if this anus produced anything other than sewage. Unless of course it's actually Satan worship, in which case Satan's design is brilliantly sadistic. Perfectly Just presuming christians are perfectly evil and deserve optimized suffering and failure. Carry on.
Basically, modelling works, provided your model is sufficiently detailed and you fix the model by comparing it to Reality. In sociology in particular, the detail threshold is laughably low. Barely need discipline. Works perfectly as a hobby, doesn't need to be a job.
Via recursive comparison, the ideal can be refined into something fully workable, while simultaneously continuously increasing your ability to predict the thing that's already there.
The ideal focuses your attention on the diffs. You learn what's important and what isn't. The nature of the diffs gives you hints on where to look, in other words, fractally focuses your focus.
If you have a working ideal, rather than [stop the madness] you can chart a specific strategic pathway from here to there. You know exactly what needs to be changed, meaning you can work out exactly what's needed to change it, based on why it needs to be changed.
The technique is necessarily based on coming up with a fanciful, imaginative ideal.
Utopianism is based on aposiopesis. It comes up with the ideal, then stops. It assumes the ideal is realistic, rather than checking to see if it has anything to learn from reality. It assumes the only reason everyone didn't come up with the same ideal is malice - that is, they did come up with the same ideal, but they did so for the purposes of avoiding it.
It is perfectly okay to make assumptions if your assumptions are correct. However, if they were reliable, we wouldn't call them assumptions. It would be called divination or whatever. The term [assumption] refers specifically to relying on unreliable methods.
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