Form: Critique

MORE ‘BERNARD’ (A SYNONYM FOR SOPHISM?)

—A simple empirical issue with “Natural” Law based systems: The delusion of natural law is a design to create an unchangeable law.”—

All laws of nature of unchangable, that’s what categorizes them as laws. We did not invent reciprocity. We discovered it. Every language throughout history that we know of has some version of ‘True/Not-False’ and ‘fair’/right/just’.

Again, reciprocity is calculable and decidable independent of opinion.

—“-A system based on an unchangeable law is a fixed system that cannot adapt to situations.”—

I mean, there are very few laws of nature, and the whole of reality including us obeys them. There is only one law of cooperation and that is reciprocity, and all legal codes, all moral codes, and all civilizations obey them in one way or another. But we construct all sorts of arrangements using that very simple law – from the primitive consanguineous to the most advanced technological. And it has to be that way for people to rationally cooperate. (The fact that it produces Pareto power distributions and Nash equilibriums not optimums for any or equality for all is a feature, not fault – otherwise evolution by suppression of the parasitic (and defective) would be impossible. This is a physical law of nature. The fact that we use reciprocity to CALCULATE (measure) that physical law is simply knowledge of it’s existence. And the fact that some try to cheat that law to defeat their inferiority is also knowledge of its existence.

So while all laws are unchangeable, our creativity in making use of them has been nearly endless.

—“-Any system of rules can be abused (hacked).”—

All social order suffer from the problem of centralizing rents(thefts, frauds, free riding) in order to suppress local rents, thereby increasing trust in production at the cost of decreasing trust in government. The problem is that few peoples have been successful at using central suppression of local (thefts, frauds, and rents). So yes because of the concentration of power in central suppression only courts and rule of law of reciprocity, and high trust society have succeeded in suppressing central rent seeking whatsoever. That said, as I’ve tried to show in my work, there is no reason why we cannot suppress those centralized rents as well as localized rents. It’s just a matter of continuing the expansion of the investments we insure against parasitism and predation, by expansion of the law, and removal of the freedom from prosecution of those in the centralization of suppression.

—“As opposed to the delusions of Fascistic objectivists, hackable systems reward not the “geniuses” they envision, but the ones that are most able to hack the particular system.”—

Well, truth, sovereignty, reciprocity, and as a consequence, markets in everything, are indeed fascist in the sense that such juridical system (nomocracy) leaves no room for opposition (lying, non-sovereignty, irreciprocity, and involuntary organization of productions of all kinds.) SO yes, that’s why I call nomocracy (humorously) market fascism for the same reason truth is a fascism. You can’t really oppose truth, sovereignty, and reciprocity and justify it as anything other than parasitism and dysgenia.

—“As people realize a patch is impossible, they will slowly develop a desire to change the law so that it rewards people for helping the group instead of abusing it.”—-

Historically, the means of circumventing a failure of legal operation is civil conflict, revolt, or revolution. The anglo saxon system has lasted the longest by far for the simple reason that all that has been required is a conflict followed by increasing the limits on the state and increasing the participation of the membership. Compare that with the french or italian or for god’s sake russian and chinese…. The Hindus are interesting because while a deeply feminine civilization and easily and repeatedly dominated, and unable to develop technological civilization, they maintained the same system of rule effectively forever.

But conversely what you suggest is simply false. Monarchies and governments have allowed trading posts or ‘ghettos’ to use their own customary rule internally but forced reciprocity across groups. In fact every attempt to produce a competing law has been suppressed because the only reason to do so is fraud. This is the purpose of pirate alliances, borderlands, and libertarian and marxist communes, and neoconservatives empires. They are always defeated because they must of necessity exist by escaping the costs of the commons that make private production possible.

—“This creates a subgroup that will crush the fixed system as hacking becomes more and more optimized and more and more unfair.”—

Except that has never happened right? Look what France and the Church did to the Templars. The opposite has always happened. Subgroups are crushed. Because in the end, we are always evolving toward reciprocity because we are always expanding scale of cooperation. Otherwise we enter into war. Which is simply the choice of predation over cooperation.

—“-Eventually, a patchable system will be created to allow the group to react to hackers.”—

Again that’s never happened. The best can be said is that the jews in the absence of the templars exploited the aristocracy’s bias against usury, and eventually rolled into the Rothschild/Napoleon/Bank of England debacle. Precisely becuase aristocracy found usury irreciprocal (dirty, and immoral).

So the rest of what you wrote is just wishful thinking nonsense contrary ot history contrary to incentives, and as such contrary to logic.

The strong rule, the weak are ruled, and the strong practice extraction in exchange for forcing reciprocity upon the ordinary people – because it’s simply the most profitable option, and profits are needed to finance the most profitable industry of all: RULE.

–DRIVEL BELOW THIS LINE—

—“-The power to patch will be more and more decentralized to avoid abuse as time shows that fixed authority figures are too hackable a feature. -Eventually, any group will very slowly decentralize law systems to make them too fluid to hack. -The system is as unhackable as possible when it is fully decentralized. At that point, hacking the system will require hacking an amount of subsystems equivalent to a human critical mass necessary for coercion.-To defend against it, people will slowly develop their own patchability via philosophy so that they themselves become hard to hack. This is done by abandoning individual morality and adopting a dialectical ethical system within oneself. This is only true if the original system allows for something to abuse. Property is such a feature.”—

Like i said. Drivel.

A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY IMMORALITY

(One in a long string of similar arguments)

@Bernard Mitochondrie (ie: Some Sock Account)

Well, we finally have a narrow enough argument now that I can address your errors (Presumptions really, since you haven’t articulated them as premises). You are providing an articulate criticism which is a priceless thing, in no small part because I can use it to educate others.

—“Funny. You say you understand my errors but every time you comment you prove that you didn’t understand a word of my argument to begin with.”—

I did, I just have argue through iterations to force you into a defense or attack that is criticizable in your own frame.

—“What you call errors is my refusal to adopt your restrictive way of thinking.”—

Well that’s just it. But you didn’t operationalize your way of thinking or mine. And so I will as we go through this.

—Subjective value isn’t an emotion. You should really look up what emotions are Of course I can. But, as usual, pareidolia. Everything that will not make you “gain” something will be considered irrational (without proof) and everything that does will be considered an acquisition (despite the fact that isn’t what the word means). Counterclaim : you cannot find a rational decision that doesn’t give you pleasure.”—

Well this still leaves open the question of what gives you pleasure and it’s very hard to think of anything that gives you pleasure that is not an acquisition, if only of pleasure. Even then, pleasure is a response to something. And it’s going to be reducible to a response to acquisition.

—“Stop speaking of psychology, you’re very obviously ignorant on the matter, and I turn out to be quite knowledgeable so it’s gonna turn ugly for you.”—

You mean, I deflate psychology into incentives to acquire and experiences (chemical rewards), such that all statements are commensurable regardless individual value. That’s what you mean.

(And instead you are trying to conflate personal aesthetics with juridical decidability – continuing Nietzsche’s failure to operationalize his aesthetic. And while aesthetics are only limited by agency of the individual, decidability provides maximization of group evolutionary strategy. So, as I already intuit you’re either a candidate sociopath, or you have a low sexual, social, and economic market value, and as such seek as did Neitzsche an alternative to group evolutionary strategy that you do not perceive is in your interest precisely because of your low market value.. )

—“Any source on your evolution claim? Because my sources suggest that predation and parasitism are very much prevalent in animal and human societies. I guess they never evolved.”—

Of course they are. Man is an amoral and rational creature. It is simply a fact that cooperation produces outsized returns that individuals cannot match – as many as 10k times productivity and it only accelerates with scale.

So while an individual may posses an aesthetic, and demand an aesthetic, that is very different from morality, which has nothing to do with individual aesthetics, only with producing the optimum adaptability (ooda loop) in collective defeat of competitiors while at the same time providing a means for the very best, the most elite, to demonstrate their exceptionalism by achievements in the advancement of the group.

So again, having narrowed your argument down, you are conflating (deceiving) or confusing (erroring) about the aesthetic (values) of the individual with the morality (competitive velocity) of the group.

—“I can sure find examples of non-aquisitive behavior. I cannot, however, find examples of things that cannot be construed as acquisition by a cultist. That’s how that works. To you, laughing is an acquisition of endorphins and sex is an acquisition of children. What’s happening isn’t that everything is acquisition : you simply taught yourself to frame it as such. What you’re saying is that people act according to their self-interest. But the word self-interest may include things not covered by tort law, such as informal exchanges, gifts, sex, emotions, etc, so you use acquisition to describe self-interest because it serves your purposes.”—

If you try to describe an irrational behavior you will find that all behavior is in fact rational given all inputs (including the emotional, intellectual, and physical limits of the individual). I mean I’ll ask Lee C Waaks to come in and argue that one, because he is very thorough, and convinced me to demarcate rational arational and irrational correctly into rational demonstrated choice, arational choice, and irrational argument.

If, by the same reasoning, you state that there are examples of non-acquisitive behavior, we will end up with the same argument, in that the individual is trying to acquire something, even if it’s merely a self-signal.

—“Again, “violence” only is violence if we think of it as violence. If you looked at all conflicts (how nonsensical a claim is that?) you should quote one.”—

Well, violence is like any other resource used in coercion. If we are physically coercing someone we can do so for amoral reasons (war), for moral reasons (training, restitution, punishment), and for immoral reasons (predation on the ingroup). The error I suspect you’re making (that most people make) is in universals rather than conditionals: that morality (non imposition for the purpose of preserving cooperation) applies outgroup, or that aesthetics of the individual have anything to do with morality (velocity and incentive of cooperation).

—“a- No. Plenty of conflicts exist despite reciprocity. For example, our property system is mostly reciprocal de juro, since property rights are theoretically available to all, and that the tort system surrounding it is based on compensation. Yet, conflicts exist surrounding it.”—

Well there are multiple reasons why there are conflicts, and they are (a) the angry party is just wrong (via reciprocity), (b) the angry party was too ignorant or presumptuous (most of the time) and failed due diligence instead of walking away from the opportunity, (c) legislation or regulation violate reciprocity (more often than you’d think), (d) the judge and jury are unable to decide given the scarcity of the facts, and judge by character of the individual (hence why you don’t go to court if you don’t have to.) (e) and my favorite and the one i’d like to fix: **becasue the network of exchanges presumed by the parties, and comprehensible by the judge and jury is greater than is ‘calculable’ by the parties (this is why IP law is such a catastrophe, and liability law in high risk procedures like medicine is a catastrophe). However, all of these problems are resolvable because they are problems of the construction of the law, of insurance of the law, and of accounting of transfers. In other words, we are just living in a world where the complexity of activity across heterogeneous knowledge has surpassed most of our institutional means. (although it has gotten empirically speaking much better with the availability of computers and case-searches.)

—“b- No, they aren’t always. Plenty of conflicts aren’t resolved like this, and plenty of conflicts cannot be. For example, and this is my point that you keep ignoring so far, when parties disagree on what is fair, aka, in your words, what reciprocity entails.”—

So this again is where you are confusing value (aesthetics) of the individual with truth (decidability) between parties, and (as is common) assuming it is possible to do much of anything without a system to regulate cooperation that preserves the incentive to cooperate, to take risks, and to forecast, and therefore give the group (corporation, polity, army, nation, race) the ability to compete against other groups.

Decidability means that the group can insure the resolution against conflict and prevent future conflict and therefore prevent feuds (retaliation cycles) which damage teh ability of the group to cooperate in the production of private and common goods that give them the ability to compete against others doing the same, and therefore preserve competitive advantage (greater choice of the satisfaction of aesthetic wants.).

—“Simple Example : A thinks B owes him something. B thinks A owes him something. To solve the issue, either a physical confrontation can ensue, or a powerful entity can force their point of view to prevail, possibly being met by an opposing powerful force. This kind of thing ends up in war, exactly because reciprocity is too weak to fully address such issues.”—

Well then we are at the intersection of, and choice between, the value of cooperation vs the value of conflict, vs the value of separation (boycott). And so again you are stating a universal (ideal) rather than a curve (supply and demand producing an end). Just as one cannot in fact experience a condition of sovereignty without others supplying sufficient insurance to you against all predictable (forseeable?) opponents to it, one does not have the choice of opinion in matters of dispute within the polity unless they will ensure you for it. The point being that reciprocity provides the fewest impediments to cooperative velocity necessary for the group, army, nation, race etc, to provide competitive advantage over and therefore preservation of choice over, competitors. ie: markets adapt faster than all other forms of order, and reciprocity creates the fastest markets.

[ repeated content deleted ]

—“I don’t know what you think you’re doing with property rights but if you think they’re empirically universal you need to stop doing drugs.”—

I said that conflicts are logically and empirically decidable by tests of reciprocity, as is demonstrated most obviously at the level of international law, where it is impossible to enforce any other order than reciprocity.

—“Everyone defends what they care about. If they don’t care about something they created anymore, they won’t defend it. If they care about something they do not own, or stole, or killed over, they defend it. How much was invested is only a matter because we usually invest in things we care about in the first place, and because we tend to attach ourselves to things we invest in for evolutionary reasons. However, again, you talk about ability but utterly ignore that aspect. And the fact is that ability and disability are central to the empirical reality of property. Furthermore, you ignore investments that are not material in nature, which is materialist hogwash.”—

If they don’t care any longer then they won’t bring suit now will they?

–“Humans retaliate, when they can, on impositions on what they perceive as investment, will, desire, attachment, well-being, or opportunity. Herein lies the crux : sometimes, two opposing forces genuinely believe to be retaliating against an imposition upon them. And, yet, they are fighting one another. There is no way to decide who is imposing on whom, and everyone will see things differently in these matters.”—

So what. those conflicts are decidable INDEPENDENT OF OPINION by measure of the imposition of costs upon the investments of the other parties. It is DECIDABLE, the same way two estimated distances are decidable by measurement. And as such discretion is elminated, and therefore people can calculate and take risks without worry of interpretation. That’s why the rapid adaptation of the common law is so effective. It includes very little prior restraint (largely to defend against taking actions one cannot perform restitution for) but is resolvable (decidable) post hoc.

—“Thus, what you think is or should be yours defines how you will act to apply your power. Some people end up with Classical Liberal ideas like yours (reciprocity, investment-based property, market values, peaceful exchange) because such is their sensitivity. Some will find something very much different to be fair, and the decider is power in the clash of subjectivities, not some blurry concept up in the sky.”–

Well that’s the thing, is that power to violate reciprocity is not something people want you to have unless they agree with you, and by and large we create a market for the suppression of the possibility of violating reciprocity using the law. The competition between intersets in that market generally suppresses all exercise of it OTHER than the state (which under cosmopolitan universalism violates that order.)

—-“These are not empirical statements. They are as empirical as Hoppe or Aristotle. They are logical to a man who was raised within the axiomatic confinement that allows for it to look self-evident. But, as I demonstrated time and time again, there are many an assumption that casts a shadow of doubt upon the realism of such delusions.”—

Sorry man but the study of world legal systems back to stone age tribes is a pretty well worn territory, and both the correlative (empirical) and causal (logical) as well as operational (method of decision making) is well understood. The central problem in the english langauge is the attempt to justify legislation that violates it – and that is what changed with democracy, and what must be reversed in order to restore reciprocity (sovereignty).

—“There is an absolute impossibility for any system of semantics to not be open to interpretation, because semantics are a human construct, and humans can only ever interpret reality, as it is inaccessible to our minds.”—

If that was true we wouldn’t have math, logic, programming, recipes, contract, or the similarity between story arcs and archetypes in all languages, and the various methods of providing mindfulness in the various religions. In fact, that’s why science has developed operational language, precisely because it provides commensurability regardless of experiential ability and individual or group value.

—“After that you assume that I’m a Libertarian (in the restrictive sense), which I’m simply going to ignore because the premise is false.”—

Well I don’t assume anything, I just take your arguments at face value and try to understand the reasoning you’re relying upon …. and much of that is in the Nietzschean and postmodern category of error, with some semblance of libertarian reasoning. I have no idea how you got to where you are but you are making the mistake I stated earlier, which is the difference between aesthetic and pseudo-moral argument rather than scientific and competitive.

I have this kind of debate now and then with smart alpha people but it always ends up the same – lack of market value given one’s inability to produce rewards enough for others to follow you such that you can fulfill your aesthetics. We all want the world to be other than it is, but the only way to do that is to provide incentives for those of sufficient numbers to change the status quo by one of the available means of coercion.

Anyway, I think I’ve beaten your argument into a proverbial dead horse to the point where it’s mush, so that’s enough.

I don’t remember if you have other comments in the thread, but if you do it’s likely that you have made the same error: failure to operationalize your ideas into a model that can survive competition in the real world.

Anyone can invent a way of thinking. it’s called fantasizing. The problem is, providing incentives such that men can organize to change state (status quo) from one set of institutions and means of decidability and another.

Some of us daydream, and some of us engineer.

I might fail but at least I’m engineering.