I understand "there is a substrata of reality that is there, and we build upon it arbitrarily through language afterwords" as division between factual and social reality. Our biology is the same across cultures, the ideas of gender are not. For a change, I won't refer to Polynesian culture, but quote a wise person from the Mohawk tribe I respect a lot:
"Most tribes recognize four genders: feminine female, masculine female, feminine male, masculine male. Some recognize another one or two. There can be two spirits in one body, each can be any one of the four genders, independent of the other.
There is no stigma to homosexuality or bisexuality. It is merely an expression of the nature of the two spirits. In fact, if you try to suppress the urges the Great Spirit gave you, it is an insult to her."
The woke movement behaves like they are trying to solve something we all screwed up, so we are not worth to be allowed even talking about it. Wrong. Well, half wrong. We did screw up, but it also has been solved long ago already, by many cultures, who recognized intersex exists and sex and gender are two things. They live fine since without depression or anxiety about it. How? They just apply the universal human rights, since before they were even worded. Everybody has the right to live in dignity and is treated equal. The fact that the woke movement does not ask for that tells they really are just after political power by oppression, not after better life for everybody.
Agree, but I'd say there's also a fundamental difference between the cultures you mention and something we could call the postmodern West: many of the other cultures still include references to transcendence (God, Nature, Gaïa, etc) in their onthology, and these serve as meaning-making structures inside of which you inscribe your multiple spirited people or whatever. We, on the other hand, are living the consequences of Nietzsche's Deicide (killing of God): when you eliminate the point of fugue towards transcendence, and you add deconstructivist onthology hell-bent on tearing everything down to see the power dynamics underneath, you're practically destroying all meaning and meaning structures. So you predictibly get rabid nihilism (Nietzsche foresaw this) and people devoid of all meaning, where the only thing left to create an identity are your personal and subjective traumas. Paradoxically, the WOKE deconstructivist movement that negates objective reallity has now objectivized personal feelings and turned these into the sole objective truth. So identities are now either arbitrary gender proclamations that are unopposable (I can't prove you're not what you say you think you are) or self-diagnosed pathologies (anxiety, depression, etc). By trying to destroy the objective substrata, they've reified (turned into an object) our most inner thoughts and personalities.
I do not recognize key differences between old cultures that have a non-binary and those that have a binary gender model. There are examples of both with religion being everywhere.
I disagree to "the only thing left to create an identity are your personal and subjective traumas", but I do see the correlation, and likely causality, between lack of meaning and defining identity by other means, which is constructing a social reality loosely based on a factual reality. That can be trauma, but is not limited to that.
You raise a major question: Do identities need external validation or are unopposable self-proclamations valid, too? Which of course asks for the definition of identity. To me, it is the mental model a person has of themselves. As such, it is subjective, but also cannot be proven or denied externally, at least not entirely. That is a constructivist approach, but it agrees with my experience and I do not say that light hearted. The human experience is more wide than we can imagine, but you do not recognize how much until it hits you personally and even then it does not cause understanding, but just accepting you don't get some things that are valid.
In terms of pathologies, the term self-diagnosis is correct. In terms of gender, or neurotype, I prefer discovery. Discovering something you never knew about your identity will explain much of your life, of weird experiences, but in fact it makes you less unique, not more. It adds no meaning to your life, just understanding, and often a constructive approach for the future. We see what feels like a wave of that due to the acquisition and distribution of knowledge in online communities. Those people always existed, but were hidden, and that hiding and the constant clash with society is a cause for various mental illnesses.
That is one side of it. The other is, as you mentioned and I said above, the issue with lack of meaning and defining identity by other means. It is not even as easy as asking for claims and demands originating from that: My favorite example is the toilet discussion. In the Netherlands, newly built workplace toilets offer privacy and are unisex. The society silently changed to put universal human rights in action. In Germany that is illegal and only allowed for toilets designated to physical disabilities, and there is a heated discussion on how gender divergent people dare to make everything so complicated. To me one culture
solved the problem and another enjoys discrimination. That's how I see the Mohawk and their gender model: They just solved it hundreds of years ago.
There are people who self-diagnose mental illnesses on Tik Tok and it totally sounds like that is just their religion, like making diet a religion, or pretty much anything else. There are woke people using about anything identity related to claim political power and they sound just the same as those Tik Tok users. They construct a social reality partially based on a factual reality, but that does not change the factual reality and that is not as simple as it may seem, yet also not unsolvable complex, as shown by example.
One of my key interest in this Newsletter is not so much "identity" but "being", which adds a more phenomenal element, since philosophically "identity" is simply an analytical category ("A=B; B=C; A=C" etc) whereas "being" is more of a human experience. The fact that we have some many, radically different, yet competing, models for "being" is fascinating. You can go from the radical, Buddhist approach, "there is no I", to the Cartesian and solipsistic "I am the only thing that is". And let's not even get into Heidegger!
We'll take those ideas out for a spin in the Newsletter see what gives.
I was about to agree, because I am actually used to that definition as well in engineering, but I checked the Oxford dictionary and to my surprise the closest is "the state or feeling of being very similar to and able to understand somebody/something", which really does not allow to use identity as the property you correctly to me describe above and which does not allow to drop "able to understand". The Oxford dictionary of academic English offers "an equation that is true for all possible values of the letters in the equation" which is way too restricted as well, but at least I see the intention of the dictionary authors.
I guess we need to accept that our definition of "identity" is not mainstream and that it really means both things, making it ambiguous, which is even worse when trying to dive into the possible models for "being". Oh language! I would love to see criticism of "being" being defined as the constructivistic (?) approach of the mental model resulting from observing myself, which inherently says it is subjective, simplified and possibly wrong, making the search for truth hard, but also worthwhile. The struggle around identity/being is anything but new, yet it is also a current topic and bringing different thoughts into this discussion might help to calm down woke aggression.
The radical constructivists are anti-Platonist, which is to say that it questions the representational theory of knowledge and truth first formulated 2500 years ago, and still used as a folk theory in the culture today. However, that theory has been abandoned not just in modern philosophy, but in practical fields as such as education and robotics, because this 2500 year old folk theory simply doesn't work when one starts doing real science.
"…we match machine learning (ML) and interactive machine learning (iML) with radical constructivism (RC) to build a tentative radical constructivist framework for iML; we then present a pilot study in which RC-framed iML is applied to assistive robotics, namely upper-limb prosthetics (myocontrol)."
This is not restricted to robotics, but I leave further explorations to you.
I also know quite a few young people who are depressed and anxious. Radical constructivism has nothing to with it.
Let me sum up what I hear from them directly:
The world faces a number of critical issues which will affect their future negatively. Their bumbling and/or venal elders are simply incompetent to address these issues effectively. That, they find depressing.
I suggest that rather than theorise about young people. you just ask them directly. They are much smarter than you seem to give them credit. :-)
Indeed. This is what happens when people start pretending they know stuff by quickly checking YouTube, Wikipedia or social media.
Before reading your article, I've been saying something similar to "The pendulum is going to swing back, pretty soon, and is going to punch y'all in the face".
* Is it possible within those extreme frameworks to pose “assumptions”? Like, “let’s suppose that I exist and the other exists too, and that we are both trying to coordinate a common action that would save our lives.” The answer can be positive even if we need more assumptions, like I can say “I”.
* If assumptions were possible, doesn’t this become an epistemological problem?
I’m deconstructing the “I think, therefore I am”. I’m wondering if can analyze in that framework: let’s suppose I think. In that case, let’s consider whether I am or not.
It sounds like they concluded that everything is some form of deduction based on unfounded axioms. I said deduction and not induction, because I have come to believe that induction is just deduction with some axioms about how can get some new conclusions.
Even statistics are deduction (some of them love saying there is induction there, like magic).
At this point, I wonder if it’s possible to have a philosophy program to understand how small set of assumptions recreate certain things, or versions of that. For instance, they might want to identify what assumptions create the Herero patriarchy. The trick is the minimality.
This program is a bit the jump from pure math analysis to computer science.
Goedel killed the idea that all true theorems can be proven for a logic system that can do arithmetic. Turing show the same for a machine that can do logic inference, so it wasn’t something special about arithmetic.
In the graphical novel Logicomix, Papadimitriu argues that Computer Science emerged from that failure: we have a machine, is imperfect but we can understand it’s power.
Jumping to politics, Arrow proved that under a set of seemly reasonable assumptions about voting among K options, there is no voting rule satisfying all of the assumptions except for having one dictator that sets the preferences of all the voters. That’s the fundamental result of what is called now “social choice”.
They got into voting manipulation: is it possible to manipulate the election? Well, if you have infinite amount of money, and voters have a price, you got it.
Around 20 years ago, some people started to look at that through computer science: what would it take to manipulate under voting rule X? You need to account for how much money and for knowing where to put the money. In turn, knowing is costly: are you doing a survey?
I think the results are of the form: majority voting is easier to manipulate than voting rules preference ranking because it should be cheaper to pay them to vote for something else, but X Y and Z to win with 20%, while some rules with ranking are more robust to ties, and find consensus beyond the top choice. Right there, that manipulation requires epistemological assumptions. Once we have them, we can compare the relative cost of manipulation.
So, going back to the philosophical program, what if we compare how costly is to reconstruct aspects of a reality: what assumptions can be posed, and how costly is to unfold that reality for the ones in there.
Externally, for those of us who had no problem believing that there is a substrata, that analysis might help us identify what assumptions we really need and why sharing those assumptions might not always takes us there.
In summary, it seems that for them there are no axioms. I’m ok with some people saying that. They serve as mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists serve other science: we don’t go to them for telling us what’s true or what to do. We go to them to keep more consistency in what we are doing because we assume that higher consistency pays off. At least for surviving the imminent hit with the poker in our heads.
Ps: years ago, when I was a master student in Venezuela, a couple of students passed by, one of them saying that everything is relative. I told them without stopping: try saying that to a bullet.
Great comment! I love Logicomix, an amazing read...
There's a couple of things in your comment. One of the reasons Constructivism appeared in the first place, was the impossibility of grounding knowledge, aka, doing away with "assumptions". The whole Kantian & Cartesian models where built explicitly so you wouldn't have to "assume" anything: this bedrock of pure knowledge would allow you to expand outwards and build a whole, objective philosophical system.
The last great attempt at this was analytical philosophy (Russell, The Vienna Circle, The first Wittgenstein), where mathematics were the building block for language (The Principia Matematica & the Tractatus, for example). As you mention, Göddel, among others (The second Wittgenstein) destroyed that project, so everything derived from this epistemological point of view, Structuralism, for example, also came crashing down.
The best argument I've heard for "assumptions" is in Wittgenstein's "On certainty". He's going to follow your line of thought to its consequence: if you ask, what is this belief based on... And the next one, and the next one; you will finally get to what he calls "Bedrock principles": assumptions you just have to have in order to be able to make sense of the world. These don't have *any* justification: for Wittgenstein, this happens when you get to the answer, "I don't know, this is just what we do".
Of course, you see how relativism and constructionism burst through the door, here: if the answer to, "why do you think money has any value" is "I don't know, it's just what we believe" (or pick a better example), then you can easily retort, "well, since that's arbitrary, then absolutely everything derived from it is arbitrary, so it's all relative". That's what radical constructivists do.
However, just because things are "arbitrary" doesn't mean they're random, make no sense and have no moral value. In Venezuela, we use the "Bolivar", not the "Euro" and this is arbitrary but not random. There are evolutionary and adaptive reasons why we use money: fast exchanges, easy growth of a business, financial-value-attribution to work; and there are also ethical and moral concerns: creation of private wealth, investment in family well-being, capacity to save and not work all the time, etc.
I feel like I didn't choose the right example. In any case, to me, the problem of constructivism is exactly that: it's not because you have competing arbitrary narratives and assumptions that this mean (1) they all have the same value, (2) they're both morally acceptable.
If you have two world-views, let's say (1) Gay rights and equality and (2) Illegal homosexuality, you can argue all you want about cultural relativism but they don't have the same value or morals. World (1) is a world where society can extract as much knowledge and value from the gay population as possible because they are accepted; so you're de facto going to have a talent pool about 14% larger. So your science & humanities will be better. And (2) there is something to be said, from a moral point of view, about imprisoning, beating and killing your fellow citizens. You're actively increasing the suffering of the world, so in moral philosophy you should prefer model 1.
I hope this makes sense or even addresses your question?
I understand "there is a substrata of reality that is there, and we build upon it arbitrarily through language afterwords" as division between factual and social reality. Our biology is the same across cultures, the ideas of gender are not. For a change, I won't refer to Polynesian culture, but quote a wise person from the Mohawk tribe I respect a lot:
"Most tribes recognize four genders: feminine female, masculine female, feminine male, masculine male. Some recognize another one or two. There can be two spirits in one body, each can be any one of the four genders, independent of the other.
There is no stigma to homosexuality or bisexuality. It is merely an expression of the nature of the two spirits. In fact, if you try to suppress the urges the Great Spirit gave you, it is an insult to her."
The woke movement behaves like they are trying to solve something we all screwed up, so we are not worth to be allowed even talking about it. Wrong. Well, half wrong. We did screw up, but it also has been solved long ago already, by many cultures, who recognized intersex exists and sex and gender are two things. They live fine since without depression or anxiety about it. How? They just apply the universal human rights, since before they were even worded. Everybody has the right to live in dignity and is treated equal. The fact that the woke movement does not ask for that tells they really are just after political power by oppression, not after better life for everybody.
Agree, but I'd say there's also a fundamental difference between the cultures you mention and something we could call the postmodern West: many of the other cultures still include references to transcendence (God, Nature, Gaïa, etc) in their onthology, and these serve as meaning-making structures inside of which you inscribe your multiple spirited people or whatever. We, on the other hand, are living the consequences of Nietzsche's Deicide (killing of God): when you eliminate the point of fugue towards transcendence, and you add deconstructivist onthology hell-bent on tearing everything down to see the power dynamics underneath, you're practically destroying all meaning and meaning structures. So you predictibly get rabid nihilism (Nietzsche foresaw this) and people devoid of all meaning, where the only thing left to create an identity are your personal and subjective traumas. Paradoxically, the WOKE deconstructivist movement that negates objective reallity has now objectivized personal feelings and turned these into the sole objective truth. So identities are now either arbitrary gender proclamations that are unopposable (I can't prove you're not what you say you think you are) or self-diagnosed pathologies (anxiety, depression, etc). By trying to destroy the objective substrata, they've reified (turned into an object) our most inner thoughts and personalities.
Cheers
I do not recognize key differences between old cultures that have a non-binary and those that have a binary gender model. There are examples of both with religion being everywhere.
I disagree to "the only thing left to create an identity are your personal and subjective traumas", but I do see the correlation, and likely causality, between lack of meaning and defining identity by other means, which is constructing a social reality loosely based on a factual reality. That can be trauma, but is not limited to that.
You raise a major question: Do identities need external validation or are unopposable self-proclamations valid, too? Which of course asks for the definition of identity. To me, it is the mental model a person has of themselves. As such, it is subjective, but also cannot be proven or denied externally, at least not entirely. That is a constructivist approach, but it agrees with my experience and I do not say that light hearted. The human experience is more wide than we can imagine, but you do not recognize how much until it hits you personally and even then it does not cause understanding, but just accepting you don't get some things that are valid.
In terms of pathologies, the term self-diagnosis is correct. In terms of gender, or neurotype, I prefer discovery. Discovering something you never knew about your identity will explain much of your life, of weird experiences, but in fact it makes you less unique, not more. It adds no meaning to your life, just understanding, and often a constructive approach for the future. We see what feels like a wave of that due to the acquisition and distribution of knowledge in online communities. Those people always existed, but were hidden, and that hiding and the constant clash with society is a cause for various mental illnesses.
That is one side of it. The other is, as you mentioned and I said above, the issue with lack of meaning and defining identity by other means. It is not even as easy as asking for claims and demands originating from that: My favorite example is the toilet discussion. In the Netherlands, newly built workplace toilets offer privacy and are unisex. The society silently changed to put universal human rights in action. In Germany that is illegal and only allowed for toilets designated to physical disabilities, and there is a heated discussion on how gender divergent people dare to make everything so complicated. To me one culture
solved the problem and another enjoys discrimination. That's how I see the Mohawk and their gender model: They just solved it hundreds of years ago.
There are people who self-diagnose mental illnesses on Tik Tok and it totally sounds like that is just their religion, like making diet a religion, or pretty much anything else. There are woke people using about anything identity related to claim political power and they sound just the same as those Tik Tok users. They construct a social reality partially based on a factual reality, but that does not change the factual reality and that is not as simple as it may seem, yet also not unsolvable complex, as shown by example.
One of my key interest in this Newsletter is not so much "identity" but "being", which adds a more phenomenal element, since philosophically "identity" is simply an analytical category ("A=B; B=C; A=C" etc) whereas "being" is more of a human experience. The fact that we have some many, radically different, yet competing, models for "being" is fascinating. You can go from the radical, Buddhist approach, "there is no I", to the Cartesian and solipsistic "I am the only thing that is". And let's not even get into Heidegger!
We'll take those ideas out for a spin in the Newsletter see what gives.
Cheers
I was about to agree, because I am actually used to that definition as well in engineering, but I checked the Oxford dictionary and to my surprise the closest is "the state or feeling of being very similar to and able to understand somebody/something", which really does not allow to use identity as the property you correctly to me describe above and which does not allow to drop "able to understand". The Oxford dictionary of academic English offers "an equation that is true for all possible values of the letters in the equation" which is way too restricted as well, but at least I see the intention of the dictionary authors.
I guess we need to accept that our definition of "identity" is not mainstream and that it really means both things, making it ambiguous, which is even worse when trying to dive into the possible models for "being". Oh language! I would love to see criticism of "being" being defined as the constructivistic (?) approach of the mental model resulting from observing myself, which inherently says it is subjective, simplified and possibly wrong, making the search for truth hard, but also worthwhile. The struggle around identity/being is anything but new, yet it is also a current topic and bringing different thoughts into this discussion might help to calm down woke aggression.
"Watzlawick and other cultural profiteers decided to double down and argue absolutely all reality is an arbitrary convention."
Well, no. That's not what they said. You were—as you say—a student.
Here's a more accurate presentation of the radical constructivism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructivism
The radical constructivists are anti-Platonist, which is to say that it questions the representational theory of knowledge and truth first formulated 2500 years ago, and still used as a folk theory in the culture today. However, that theory has been abandoned not just in modern philosophy, but in practical fields as such as education and robotics, because this 2500 year old folk theory simply doesn't work when one starts doing real science.
For instance:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221426/
"Scientific publications on educational robotics are commonly anticipated by references to constructivism and constructionism."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323782114_Applying_Radical_Constructivism_to_Machine_Learning_A_Pilot_Study_in_Assistive_Robotics
"…we match machine learning (ML) and interactive machine learning (iML) with radical constructivism (RC) to build a tentative radical constructivist framework for iML; we then present a pilot study in which RC-framed iML is applied to assistive robotics, namely upper-limb prosthetics (myocontrol)."
This is not restricted to robotics, but I leave further explorations to you.
I also know quite a few young people who are depressed and anxious. Radical constructivism has nothing to with it.
Let me sum up what I hear from them directly:
The world faces a number of critical issues which will affect their future negatively. Their bumbling and/or venal elders are simply incompetent to address these issues effectively. That, they find depressing.
I suggest that rather than theorise about young people. you just ask them directly. They are much smarter than you seem to give them credit. :-)
Indeed. This is what happens when people start pretending they know stuff by quickly checking YouTube, Wikipedia or social media.
Before reading your article, I've been saying something similar to "The pendulum is going to swing back, pretty soon, and is going to punch y'all in the face".
Can't wait. ¡Abrazón!
Nice one, my friend.
Two questions:
* Is it possible within those extreme frameworks to pose “assumptions”? Like, “let’s suppose that I exist and the other exists too, and that we are both trying to coordinate a common action that would save our lives.” The answer can be positive even if we need more assumptions, like I can say “I”.
* If assumptions were possible, doesn’t this become an epistemological problem?
I’m deconstructing the “I think, therefore I am”. I’m wondering if can analyze in that framework: let’s suppose I think. In that case, let’s consider whether I am or not.
It sounds like they concluded that everything is some form of deduction based on unfounded axioms. I said deduction and not induction, because I have come to believe that induction is just deduction with some axioms about how can get some new conclusions.
Even statistics are deduction (some of them love saying there is induction there, like magic).
At this point, I wonder if it’s possible to have a philosophy program to understand how small set of assumptions recreate certain things, or versions of that. For instance, they might want to identify what assumptions create the Herero patriarchy. The trick is the minimality.
This program is a bit the jump from pure math analysis to computer science.
Goedel killed the idea that all true theorems can be proven for a logic system that can do arithmetic. Turing show the same for a machine that can do logic inference, so it wasn’t something special about arithmetic.
In the graphical novel Logicomix, Papadimitriu argues that Computer Science emerged from that failure: we have a machine, is imperfect but we can understand it’s power.
Jumping to politics, Arrow proved that under a set of seemly reasonable assumptions about voting among K options, there is no voting rule satisfying all of the assumptions except for having one dictator that sets the preferences of all the voters. That’s the fundamental result of what is called now “social choice”.
They got into voting manipulation: is it possible to manipulate the election? Well, if you have infinite amount of money, and voters have a price, you got it.
Around 20 years ago, some people started to look at that through computer science: what would it take to manipulate under voting rule X? You need to account for how much money and for knowing where to put the money. In turn, knowing is costly: are you doing a survey?
I think the results are of the form: majority voting is easier to manipulate than voting rules preference ranking because it should be cheaper to pay them to vote for something else, but X Y and Z to win with 20%, while some rules with ranking are more robust to ties, and find consensus beyond the top choice. Right there, that manipulation requires epistemological assumptions. Once we have them, we can compare the relative cost of manipulation.
So, going back to the philosophical program, what if we compare how costly is to reconstruct aspects of a reality: what assumptions can be posed, and how costly is to unfold that reality for the ones in there.
Externally, for those of us who had no problem believing that there is a substrata, that analysis might help us identify what assumptions we really need and why sharing those assumptions might not always takes us there.
In summary, it seems that for them there are no axioms. I’m ok with some people saying that. They serve as mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists serve other science: we don’t go to them for telling us what’s true or what to do. We go to them to keep more consistency in what we are doing because we assume that higher consistency pays off. At least for surviving the imminent hit with the poker in our heads.
Ps: years ago, when I was a master student in Venezuela, a couple of students passed by, one of them saying that everything is relative. I told them without stopping: try saying that to a bullet.
Great comment! I love Logicomix, an amazing read...
There's a couple of things in your comment. One of the reasons Constructivism appeared in the first place, was the impossibility of grounding knowledge, aka, doing away with "assumptions". The whole Kantian & Cartesian models where built explicitly so you wouldn't have to "assume" anything: this bedrock of pure knowledge would allow you to expand outwards and build a whole, objective philosophical system.
The last great attempt at this was analytical philosophy (Russell, The Vienna Circle, The first Wittgenstein), where mathematics were the building block for language (The Principia Matematica & the Tractatus, for example). As you mention, Göddel, among others (The second Wittgenstein) destroyed that project, so everything derived from this epistemological point of view, Structuralism, for example, also came crashing down.
The best argument I've heard for "assumptions" is in Wittgenstein's "On certainty". He's going to follow your line of thought to its consequence: if you ask, what is this belief based on... And the next one, and the next one; you will finally get to what he calls "Bedrock principles": assumptions you just have to have in order to be able to make sense of the world. These don't have *any* justification: for Wittgenstein, this happens when you get to the answer, "I don't know, this is just what we do".
Of course, you see how relativism and constructionism burst through the door, here: if the answer to, "why do you think money has any value" is "I don't know, it's just what we believe" (or pick a better example), then you can easily retort, "well, since that's arbitrary, then absolutely everything derived from it is arbitrary, so it's all relative". That's what radical constructivists do.
However, just because things are "arbitrary" doesn't mean they're random, make no sense and have no moral value. In Venezuela, we use the "Bolivar", not the "Euro" and this is arbitrary but not random. There are evolutionary and adaptive reasons why we use money: fast exchanges, easy growth of a business, financial-value-attribution to work; and there are also ethical and moral concerns: creation of private wealth, investment in family well-being, capacity to save and not work all the time, etc.
I feel like I didn't choose the right example. In any case, to me, the problem of constructivism is exactly that: it's not because you have competing arbitrary narratives and assumptions that this mean (1) they all have the same value, (2) they're both morally acceptable.
If you have two world-views, let's say (1) Gay rights and equality and (2) Illegal homosexuality, you can argue all you want about cultural relativism but they don't have the same value or morals. World (1) is a world where society can extract as much knowledge and value from the gay population as possible because they are accepted; so you're de facto going to have a talent pool about 14% larger. So your science & humanities will be better. And (2) there is something to be said, from a moral point of view, about imprisoning, beating and killing your fellow citizens. You're actively increasing the suffering of the world, so in moral philosophy you should prefer model 1.
I hope this makes sense or even addresses your question?
Cheers