Ummm, why can there not be democracy, infrastructure, and equilibrium on the socialist island?
I didn't say that there would be a lack of democracy and infrastructure on the socialist island, but there wouldn't be equilibrium on the socialist island because socialism doesn't have this trait, and that's what the socialism island volunteers would desire as supporters of the philosophy that the collective gets priority over the individual.
Hate to break it to you, but a thought experiment is neither scientific, objective, nor impartial.
I don't agree with this.
Coming up with an opinion is considered scientific; this is what physicians, nurse practitioners, dentists, and therapists do as scientific professionals all the time.
Being objective and impartial with a thought experiment is basically a matter of choice, and the interest in trying to correctly determine the outcomes of each island is an incentive to be objective and impartial. A real-world experiment, if conducted scientifically, objectively, and impartially, would yield results; these results are the outcomes that would be compared to the outcomes from a thought experiment.
An individual trying this thought experiment who has no political ideology leanings would have no reason to not be objective & impartial with their opinion
An individual trying this thought experiment who does have a political ideology leaning also has nothing to gain by coming up with a opinion that isn't objective & impartial, either, since a real-world experiment would reveal that it is a bad opinion.
It's irrelevant because I and my family, friends, coworkers and neighbors are not participating or involved.
This is not plausible; you're reading and posting on this online forum, which means you have an internet connection, which means you're not living in complete isolation from the rest of the internet-connected world, and maybe you have some family and friends that are living in complete isolation from the rest of the internet-connected world, but not your coworkers and neighbors.
I'm also reading and posting on this online forum, which is in the internet-connected world, and I know from observation that it's a society of different competing political ideologies and their consequences; this means that you must also be in that same sort of society of different competing political ideologies and their consequences.
If a group of like-minded individuals all decided they wanted to buy a large plot of land and live together in a highly cooperative, highly self sustaining. low environmental impact way, or another group of like-minded individuals wanted to eschew all non-human/animal powered technology and live like the Amish without their integrated religious beliefs, how is my opinion on living in those ways relevant to them and their percieved levels of happiness. Just because I may not be happy there is irrelevant.
It isn't (necessarily) relevant to them; you're attacking a strawman.
Your thought experiment has preselected like-minded individuals, it did not take a random selection of individuals and toss them on three island to figure things out.
That's correct, but this is just more strawman attacking. You and I are both in same sort of society of different competing political ideologies and their consequences, and because of this, it's difficult if not impossible to objectively and impartially figure things out in such a mixture of political ideologies.
By isolating political ideologies, with this 3-island experiment, we may be able to figure things out.
If you want to demonstrate that, then I would recommend some changes to the experiment. Make each island identical with only 10% arable land that would be barely sufficient to susstain 1000 inhabitants at subsistance levels.
Yeah, it might be necessary to resort to something like this, but my anticipation is that it wouldn't be necessary to start off like this. The reason I'm proposing that there's an initial supply of abundance is to let the experiment start off with things being in good condition to let each one maintain that good condition or deplete; it's also to give the volunteers some slack to settle into the experiment so they won't want to bail out; they're not going to be trapped like prisoners on the islands IRL. LOL
I'm assuming that the basic outcomes will be the same regardless of whether they're primed with high or low abundance, and that starting off with low abundance would just make the outcomes more contrasting.
I see no reason for why it wouldn't just be more or less contrasting, but real-life experiments could be carried out more than once & that could include starting off with differences in abundance in repetitions of the experiment to see if that's a bad assumption.
Next, add individuals in groups of 200 at the start of the experiment and annually for the next two years, then add the remaining 400 at the start of year four. No participants are made aware in advance of this scheme, or that there are others on the island if they are in a subsequent group.
Well, the reason I'd prefer not to take this approach is because starting off with a group of 200 is too close to Dunbar's number, and that may have an effect of skewing results away from something that simulates a real world consisting of billions of people. I chose 1,000 volunteers because I think it's big enough to be far enough from Dunbar's number, and I don't want to go beyond 1,000 volunteers because it just makes things more difficult in terms of finding volunteers and funding for things like transporting the volunteers, providing initial resources for them, etc. Don't forget that it's a total of 3,000 volunteers, which makes it 3 times as difficult and expensive.
What would your prediction be regarding the difference between a collective minded group vs an individualistic minded group in the scenario after the five years are up?
I basically covered this in this post:
One thing that comes to mind regarding this experiment is that it seems to imply that success or failure is solely dependent upon whatever abstract "system" is implemented. I've always considered this to be a flawed approach, since it seems that, historically, there are myriad factors which can...
www.religiousforums.com
But since you're only asking about the difference between the collective and individualistic minded groups, I expect the collective minded group to turn out fairly ok and far better than the individualistic minded group.
I think the individualistic minded group will have more to learn about themselves, society, and the importance of having some sort of political infrastructure, than the collective minded group, but the collective minded group will realize that they must to come to terms with the discovery or realization that there are large flaws in a few of their premises.