Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

Edward Fürst

1 – Excellent demonstration of Pilpul.

2 – Excellent use of straw man.

3 – Excellent use of argument from ignorance.

4 – Excellent user of black or white fallacy

5 – Excellent use of shaming.

6 – Excellent use of using all of the above to construct overloading.

7 – Excellent use of creating a high cost of defense.

In other words, an excellent use of Pilpul. Which is your usual argumentative technique: to raise the cost of refutation not to seek understanding, and not to refute but to make truthful discourse impossible. To demonstrate that you are in fact one of the liars we seek to prevent from lying.

Now that we have established the method by which you conduct your intuitionistic attempt to pollute the commons, we can address your deceit point by point.

ON DEFINITIONS OF IMPULSIVITY

The article you site does not test impulsivity but aggression. Aggression may be the result of impulsiveness or reason, but the willingness to bear costs and risks in order to obtain returns does exist in a spectrum with men taking greater risks and women fewer risks. Hence why men are more expendable and why we are born in slightly greater numbers.

So the question is instead why we would not prosecute the authors for conflating impulse with aggression since while aggression may be impulsive, men and women are equally impulsive but unequally aggressive.

In fact, women have a much harder time managing their impulsive emotions. And they need to. Because the cost of caring for offspring is non-rational. SO women must be incentivized by nature non-rationally. They risk less but work more. We work less but risk more. We generally describe the differences as women play the role of gatherer-tortoise and men the role of hunter-hare. But this is just a necessary division of labor.

ON LEGALITY OF TRUTH

1) the scientific method consists not of a method but a set of criteria for eliminating falsehood.

2) science requires operational language, parsimony, limits and full accounting. It does not require objective morality. Law does (mostly) require it. Science is extremely good at policing itself. (science proper does not take social science seriously).

3) the law already includes many tests of sufficiency. If we can provide tests of sufficiency the law can treat them as any other list of sufficiency – particularly in moral matters (involuntary transfer). We must give the law tests of sufficiency. Which is what I have done with truth: warranties of sufficiency of due diligence in various dimensions.

4) If one communicates poorly that is very different from one advocating theft directly or indirectly. If one errs one can recant, and issue correction. If one cannot issue correction one can pay compensation. But in any case, in order to end up in court, one must provide another with the incentive to bring him to court, and the likelihood that such a person would prevail before a jury of one’s peers.

5) If we can teach reading, arithmetic, mathematics, and various other skills. And if we can have taught Grammar(organizing), Logic(processing) and Rhetoric(outputting), and if we can teach formal logic then we can certainly teach truthfulness. If we can write software we can write strictly constructed law.

6) It is a cost. The increase in the degree of suppression of parasitism is always a cost. But what was the cost of the failure of the last century to suppress the jewish art of lying in all fields (Pseudoscience) as a successor to the jewish art of lying in all fields in the ancient era (monotheistic scripturalism). And the cost of suppressing german philosophical discourse, or american postmodernism, or the innumeracy of keynesian economics? All costs are opportunity costs.

7) Juries are exceptionally successful at stepping into the shoes of criminals. The evidence is (and there is a lot of it) that juries are exceptionally good at their job except in the most abstract of cases. Lying is not so difficult a problem to overcome.

8) Courts already seek to identify a deception. Law is only a question if no deceptions can be found. Very few cases go to court because this is determined prior to jury.

9) The mild randomness of the jury is an incentive to reconcile disputes prior to court.

10) that judges do not specialize is the first problem. That lawyers cannot be prosecuted for falsehoods is the second. That we insufficiently select juries from peers is the third

11) Producers of all goods and services must provide warranties of sufficiency and show due diligence against the externalization of harm (costs). Where political speech can produce the greatest harm of all, there is no reason not to require it be truthfully constructed.

12) Legislation and law can be strictly constructed by the same criteria as tests of truth and this prohibits the ‘interpretation’ of the law and restores the constitution that would force the courts to return decisions to the legislature if the questions are not in fact questions of truth or law. This was the original intent of the framers, who in retrospect we can see were trying to construct a formal logic but were still to christian to do so.