Rothbardian ethics preserve the ability to ‘cheat’ by all but violence and the crudest of frauds – and rothbard supports that preservation with the argument that the market will naturally suppress that cheating. However, transaction costs alone, ensure that such suppression can’t occur. And that’s before we add in the remaining external costs of low trust.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 18:52:00 UTC
RESPECTING THE PERSON OR THE IDEAS OR CONFLATING THE TWO
(interesting) (tolerance as tax evasion)
Do you separate respect for the person from respect for their ideas or do you make the solipsistic error of conflating a persons beliefs which they can change with their physical body which they cannot?
One can say:
i) that we coexist peacefully,
ii) that we compete peacefully,
iii) that we cooperate on different ends peacefully,
iv) that we cooperate on the same ends peacefully.
If someone possesses a catastrophic error, and you wish to cooperate with them, what is the impact of letting them hold on to silly ideas?
Well, they can have whatever silly idea they want as long as it doesn’t affect your ability to cooperate on ends together.
It is possible to possess ideas, values, beliefs, traditions, myths, metaphysical value judgments that are not merely differences in tastes, but which actively PREVENT cooperation on certain types of ends and means.
If your culture denies reality, provides no means of correction of knowledge, provides no means of correction of individual thought, and at the same time, we know we must use science to understand that which we cannot perceive and sense directly, and such that
TEACHING COOPERATION ON MEANS IF NOT ENDS
In solipsistic argument, respect is for the purpose of raising children who do not yet have the ability to cooperate in the world. At some point we must become adults, or be the wards, subjects and victims of adults forever. One becomes an adult at the very point where one abandons solipsistic argument (the one you’re making probably) and distinguishes between the meaningless errors of children which they may grow out of, and the meaningful errors of adults that they may not grow out of.
Tolerance in children is necessary for pedagogy. Tolerance in adults is only logically necessary for tastes, but not for truths. If you do not correct the errors in thinking of yourself and your fellow citizens then you are a conspirator in the conspiracy of ignorance, and a threat to society – and to man. Just as you are a threat to a society and to man if you fail to enforce and adhere to manners, ethics, and morals.
TOLERANCE AS “FREE RIDING, CHEATING AND STEALING”
If you do not enforce and adhere to manners (ethics of signals), ethics (participatory ethics), and morals (ethics of externalities) then you are not paying the behavioral ‘tax’ for living in a society – you are a tax cheater so to speak in the normative system of costs. if you are less ABLE to pay normative taxes, that is the same as if you are less ABLE to pay real taxes – in both cases these are statements of your willingness and ability.
In other words, if you let adults around you believe that which is economically dangerous to the polity, then you are just trying to save yourself the cost of paying for the normative infrastructure, just like any other tax cheat is trying to save himself the cost of paying for physical infrastructure.
You can say that you are not competent (productive enough) to pay that normative tax, but if that is so, then you of course, like any other person who evades taxes, no right to speak about norms.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-05 07:14:00 UTC
THE ART OF DEBATE
One of the things I gave up on a long time ago was focusing on people’s stupid errors unless they start to rely on ad hominems.
Disputes can almost always be reduced to a central argument, which is either one of taste, utility or truth.
If people use ad hominems I try to call them out and then return to the central problem of the argument.
And I don’t really even like focusing on their errors. I just try to restate their words in the context of the central argument.
One tactic that I do use, is to taunt people in order to obtain their participation. I probably shouldn’t do that, but when the opposition is so ready to rely on every rhetorical fallacy in the book, it just seems …. fair…. and warranted. 🙂
But the best advice is to stay in the context of the central argument.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-03 10:04:00 UTC
I LOVE HUMAN BEINGS. REALLY.
Pretty much all of them. On the other hand, I have a job to do. And that job is to disabuse people of a certain category of myths that stipulate that the high trust society and the economic rewards that come from it, can persist if we dismantle the ‘rules’ that are the product of over four millennia of accumulated uncomfortable, but necessary truths.
And I must do this because our system of government, and our economy, and much of our five hundred year experiment, is very close to collapsing for the reasons that all civilizations collapse: (a) overextension (b) excessive credit (c) loss of founding moral narrative (d) failure of calculative systems that assist in cooperation and coordination while maintaining individual incentives.
Dark ages are not uncommon in man’s history. There is no reason that we could not have another. Or even something less catastrophic, like revolution, or descent into malignant tyranny.
But something is very surely going to happen in the next twenty years. And that is the end of the west as a people, as a civilization, predicated on the mythology of the enlightenment.
Perhaps as some progressives fantasize, technology will save us. But hope is not a strategy and faith is not a tactic.
SO it is left to those of us who will face uncomfortable truths, to construct the calculative sciences – the new means of cooperation and incentives – that allow us to preserve that aspect of the high trust society, at least in a caste or nation, such that innovation can persist, despite the collapse of the failure to create an Aristocracy of Everybody.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-27 14:46:00 UTC
ADVOCACY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE
Sorry. The state has created the problem of bad science like it has created almost all other ‘bads’ in our society.
Advocacy is the job of public intellectuals.
Facts are the job of scientists.
Skepticism is the job of citizens.
Judith Curry’s blog is fascinating to read – the moral hazard of scientific advocacy is inescapable, but there are a thousand regulatory prognostications a day, none of which will make any difference. People follow incentives. And advocacy makes for bad science. Books are the only advocacy that science appears to make possible. Papers are merely property claims on intellectual products. The are IP rights for ideas among scholars, scientists, and academics.
Advocacy is advertising for grant money.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-23 08:43:00 UTC
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100251229/passive-smoking-another-of-the-nanny-states-big-lies/OBVIOUS. UNPLEASANT. BUT THAT’S IT.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-22 05:54:00 UTC
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/3869117/General-George-S.-Patton-was-assassinated-to-silence-his-criticism-of-allied-war-leaders-claims-new-book.html
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-22 01:59:00 UTC
ON FEMINIST (female), POSTMODERN(male), SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY
Creating a polity by words for the purpose of rent-seeking and free riding.
Feminist Philosophy questions the foundations of ETHICS, not LOGIC. And that Feminist Rhetoric, with whom Postmodern, Totalitarian, and Socialist authors share identical tactics:
1) the purpose of their language:is not to construct categories which can be measured, but to conflate categories so that they cannot be measured. This is perhaps the most important insight that we can use to deflate totalitarian claims. The attempt to claim a group where there is diversity, in an attempt to seek rents and free ride.
2) is to create ‘unity’ or ‘group’ out of involuntary participants in that group, by loading, overloading, framing, shaming, and obscuring the differences between individuals. The purpose of this unity is so that feminists can seek extractive policies by the state, against individuals outside their group. In other words so that women can seek free riding and rents on males.
3) While it is true that in the workplace, in the aggregate, men and women are equally productive, the statement is an artifact of above-said logic of aggregation: the fact is, that 1% of people, produce almost all the material value in a society, 10% apply those insights, and another 10% communicate them effectively to all others. This is why the Pareto Rule applies to all human behavior: 20% of people own and do everything. The rest are engaged in production and consumption. And they must be. Because they can’d do anything else. And the data is the data, the upper ten percent is dominated by males, because males dominate the upper regions of intelligence by no less than four to one. Female solipsistic reasoning is solipsistic and nothing more.
4) THE PURPOSE OF FEMINIST LOGIC IS TO LIE. While I tend to keep track of feminist writing, because much of it is interesting, the fact is that women are biased much more solipsistic, just as men are biased much more autistic. And the division of knowledge and labor is painful for many women who feel isolated and unable to function in the division of knowledge and labor. Philosophy in the pursuit of truth is one thing. It is a precursor to measurement, and therefore the precursor to science. Philosophy in the pursuit of feeling better about the world we live in is something else: religion. I don’t criticize religion, simply because we ARE unequal, and I don’t feel it is my right to deny people solace. However, religion is not science, it does not correspond to reality, and we must, in science, commerce, and politics, correspond to the constraints that reality places upon us.
I wish I was six inches taller. I’m not. I can’t play basketball. I wish a lot of the time, my Aspiness wasn’t such a burden for me to constantly carry. I wish I hadn’t been born into a family with so many internal problems. I wish I hadn’t lost my first three fortunes, and each time had to make a new one.
Fantasies are fantasies. And fantasies have no place in economics and politics. We all live better lives because of science, economics and those aspects of politics that are scientific: the common law. Religions are not scientific.
Feminist philosophy as put forth in this article is just another secular religion of totalitarianism like postmodern and socialist influences that it draws from.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-15 07:43:00 UTC
FROM TRUTH TO LIE: IMPROVEMENTS TO ANALYSIS OF ARGUMENT AND DEBATE
This spectrum covers the categories of argument used to make honest statements or to deceive.
I – HONEST (SCIENTIFIC) STATEMENTS
1 – Operational language (as observable actions)
2 – Unloaded language (absent verb ‘to-be’) (Unprimed / E-Prime)
II – LOADED STATEMENTS
3 – Loaded Language (with verb ‘to be’)
4 – Shaming and Rallying Language (morally loaded language)
III – OBSTRUCTIVE STATEMENTS
5 – Obscurant Language
6 – Analogistic language
IV – DECEPTIVE STATEMENTS
7 – Lying by Omission
8 – Lying by Misrepresentation
V – COMBINED DECEPTIVE STATEMENTS
9 – combinations of types II,III,IV.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-12 04:50:00 UTC
BTC: A GOLDEN CALF
I’m begin to see Bitcoin as a libertarian golden calf.
—
(Maybe I need to go find a bush, set it afire, and pull out some rhetorical tablets. But nah… people hate it when you expose their gods.)
(Sigh.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-10 08:49:00 UTC