Metric

For entertainment purposes only, here's a real-life mad scientist talking about his proof of the afterlife, god, etc. at TEDx. This guy actually was, at one point, a great theorist -- you can judge for yourself the extent to which religion has rotted his brain:

The first digit will be a 7 one time out of 9. The first two digits will be a 7 one time out of 90. The first three digits will be a 7 one time out of 900 -- roughly 3 years. The fourth digit was not a 7, nor was the leading digit of the % gain. I am guessing there are ~100 days of some religious significance on the calendar. So, you can expect this particular "sign of the end times" (that no one would have cared about until after the fact) to happen roughly every ten years. Now that your mom has pushed in all her chips on this issue, do you get a free pass?

Just to rephrase one more time, I think a large number of these "extreme case" arguments are a special case of the following: Take a perfectly normal man, and do brain surgery on him, removing the part of his brain responsible for moral behavior. After the surgery, who can blame him for violating the moral principles you propose? Therefore, your moral principles are broken! Instead of surgery, substitute "dying of thirst" or "family about to die" or "falling from a building" or whatever -- anything that short-circuits moral agency for fundamental, biological reasons. The conclusion of anyone actually using this argument will inevitably be that government doesn't violate any moral principles (since they are all broken). But of course it is the argument that is broken -- moral theories only apply to moral agents, not brain-impaired rage-monsters.

I don't think "extreme cases" are necessarily bad things to consider -- they can give important hints as to where some theory is likely to break down. However, one has to be careful about what you can actually conclude. For example, in the "guy dying of thirst vs. absurd price gouger," you're explicitly constructing an example where you can conclude nothing. The guy is not going to try to conform to ANY moral theory -- he's just going to grab the water, as any animal would. There is just zero application to anyone's take on government -- government is not a bunch of people in a situation where they are forced to behave like animals in order to survive.

Nope, it just means that one cannot live a life upholding the NAP in a pure unfaltered way. It just means that NAP is also a matter on how people around you see it. While I can see people staring at me as a violation of NAP, because it creates distress to me, if I live along peers that do not feel the same way it isn't. If however everyone around me sees that 'staring at people' as a violation of NAP, then it might get enforced or somethin. Remember, the NAP is much more difficult to apply to individuals in contrived situations than it is to apply to institutions like government. In the case of government, it's almost trivial -- men with guns coming around to take half your income whether you agree or not. In the case of contrived trolley problems and the like, you can make anything into an agonizing case. This is why the NAP can form the core of libertarian thought -- it's extremely clear cut when you use it as intended.

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwrsKGzcZLM] I liked the over-arching point Stefan made, that articles like this just have the wrong focus -- people aren't dying because of too little aggression-against-the-innocent in the world. I also liked the point that it's an unreasonable (at this point) to demand that every possible variable and improbable circumstance be taken into account by a one-line principle. I didn't so much like the discussion of "implicit contracts" -- that seemed a little like stepping into quicksand. But anyway, I mainly wanted to point out something else -- I think perhaps Stefan was saying something like this, but it wasn't fully distilled. None of these improbable scenarios that are used as justifications for violence (attempting to discredit the NAP) actually address the NAP in the way we use it. Of course we may forgive some guy for violating the NAP in an extreme survival situation, where he must act more like an animal than a moral agent in order to survive. The circumstance is deliberately constructed such that his choice is to A) violate the NAP or B) die horribly -- instinct kicks in and would win against ANY principle of basic civilization. What we're saying with the NAP is that aggression-against-the-innocent is immoral as a fundamental working component of any institution. If it can't work without aggression-against-the-innocent as a working component, something is horribly, horribly wrong with it. THAT is the core libertarian principle. And this is the version that was barely addressed by the Zwolinski article (there is some relevance in the case of pollution, but I think something as fundamental as the 2nd law of thermodynamics deserves special treatment -- all human activities including life itself increases the entropy of the universe).

I agree that human babies don't have any inherent properties making them different from animals, which are owned. Their "special" status comes from the fact that they are extremely valuable to their parents, and will eventually become moral agents themselves (inheriting self-ownership etc. in due time when their physical properties change). I have a feeling most people are not ready for this.

...and another demonstration of the state failing even a basic comprehension of what they're supposed to be regulating. What exact behavior do they want the "bitcoin foundation" to cease and desist?

Just generally, I like the concept of being free from commtting three arguable felonies per day in the course of normal life: http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx

Something called a "major intellectual achievement" should involve an actual discovery or creation, not just a personal fight to come to terms with reason. The latter, at best, would be a "personal intellectual achievement."

On some level, this is interesting and counter-intuitive. On another level, we've all known it for a very long time -- huge numbers of people can't wait to get into that voting booth to flush their liberty and opportunity away (along with everyone else's).

I would say it is deterministic though. Lightning seemed like something random and not determined until science explained how it formed. Now with meteorology, even without every single variable, humans can make pretty decent predictions about when there will be lightning. With all the variables it could be predicted 100 percent of the time. I have little faith in the idea of true randomness. Edit: Ok so I have been googling this stuff a little now and apparently in this post I am taking the position of support for the hidden variable theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory). It appears there is a lot of evidence going against this theory. That is bothering me so much. How can true randomness be physically possible? I can't fathom it...... Yeah, hidden variable theories were mostly destroyed by experimental evidence. It appears that there is true randomness in QM. However, the randomness does not come from time evolution -- states still evolve from t1 to t2 deterministically. The probabilities come from the way information is shared between subsystems at any given time -- it is a property that is independent of time evolution. Basically, QM looks probabilistic because you are a quantum mechanical subsystem of the universe -- not because of a breakdown of cause-and-effect.

Yes, I like this approach. What is happening in a resturant is very different from what is happening with the "social contract." In a resturant, the implicit understanding is that we can avoid the whole business with escrow accounts and enforcability and simplify things greatly for everyone if you just pay the bill. If this understanding breaks down and hurts the profitability of a resturant, then the whole process has to get more explicit and more enforcable (and more complicated and expensive). It's just a market condition to which the resturant must adapt, but the market has already found a voluntary solution which is optimal for everyone. In the "social contract," someone is trying to enforce something on you that you may explicitly disagree with, by claiming that you implicitly agree to it. As usual, it's a smokescreen argument -- yes, there is "something" that is implicit in both cases, but that's where all similarities end as the "something" is completely different.

The question was answered already by a proto-libertarian a couple hundred years ago: "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild,[1] and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788[2] That's why it's rarely happens -- states are constantly in the business of seeking out and capturing new powers.

Deep question. People have purposes, and a lot of philosophy has been invented with different purposes in mind. But I suspect that most of us here are interested in using reason as a guide for the betterment of mankind (as well as individuals).

We must be talking about two different things. When I am evaluating ideas, "courage of the author" is not really on my radar -- I'm interested in who delivers the goods.

It doesn't take much courage to post anonymously on youtube, either. Anonymity vs. taking responsibility is the variable that commands courage -- not simply written vs. spoken. A reader has the advantage of time and care when he goes about analyzing an idea. If your ideas are half-baked, you need your audience and/or opponents to be limited in exactly these dimensions to have the desired effecct. This is why "fast-talking salesman" conjures up a specific type of person you don't necessarily trust.

Thanks a lot for your input but I'm not quite able to ascertain whether you fall in the category of believing sociopathy comes in degrees or is a clear cut thing? Not that I'm any expert on the subject, but I guess I imagine that sociopathic behavior comes from two types of people: 1) Those people who never developed empathy or conscience in the course of their childhood. These would be the "clear cut" cases. 2) Those people who have deliberately shut down their empathy and conscience by adopting some kind of identity or meme. These would be the less clear cut cases -- sociopathic only in certain specific ways, though they greatly outnumber type #1.

Yes, I'm pretty much in exact agreement with you.

Yes, I have a feeling that most "lack of conscience" and "lack of empathy" out there is due to deliberate suppression of conscience and empathy, rather than a fundamental biological inability. And the drive to do so comes from adopting some kind of meme that it's good or necessary to suppress empathy. As an example, imagine a kid who is fascinated by animals his whole childhood and grows up to be a biological researcher who kills animals regularly in his lab. At some point, there had to be some crowding out of his natural empathy for that to happen -- and he was driven to do so by the idea (a meme) that information about biology is more important than the lives of individual lab animals. Of course you don't have to look very far to see these kind of memes (and droves of people who have adopted them) aimed at humans rather than lab animals. If they can be convinced that the meme is evil, I suspect they can regain their natural empathy -- though it may be very hard indeed to break them out of their meme, depending on how much of their life and identity they have invested in it.

Main point is that creating something (in philosophy or any other field) doesn't depend on speaking. Selling something usually does. If someone says "philosophy is a spoken discipline" -- I will tend to interpret that as "(selling) philosophy is a spoken discipline." If they say "philosophy is not a spoken discipline" I will tend to interpret that as "(inventing) philosophy is not a spoken discipline."

An objectively better computer doesn't need a sales pitch. It does if you've been trained since pre-k to believe that you need an objectively inferior computer.

Computer science as a discipline doesn't depend much at all on speaking skill. It's not a spoken discipline. But successfully selling computers at Best Buy is definitely a spoken discipline.

The current thinking that I've seen is that the first recursively self-improving AI's will be build for a purpose -- they will have a so-called "utility function" that they will go into the world and try to maximize. However, when the utility function involves solving hard problems, and machines can make themselves more intelligent, then it becomes very useful for the machine to make itself very, very smart as one of the "first steps" towards maximizing its utility function. Certain simple utility functions would be extremely dangerous -- such as "maximize performance," since they have no regard for externalities -- the machine may wipe out all of humanity as part of achieving its goal. In fact, it is quite hard to design open-ended utility functions that aren't dangerous in this way. So the trick is to design a machine ethics that will ensure that the machine doesn't do "very bad things" as it becomes arbitrarily powerful and intelligent as it seeks to maximize its utility function -- this could be interpreted as a constraint on the utility function. Here's an interesting intro to the subject:

Usually what I personally point out are that there are huge gaps in the type of argument that Stefan would like to make. I have on several occasions posted the exact definition of "free will" given by him in his 3-part series on free will, and noted that it is not in contradiction with deterministic time evolution (his definition works equally well, regardless of the form that physics takes). But it doesn't seem to matter -- Stefan himself almost never uses his own definition of free will when he argues or posts on the topic. In fact, you'll find it rather difficult to actually find his definition in the 3-part series itself. BTW, I do think he may have something important to say regarding the philosophical concepts of choice, responsibility, etc. but they remain unfortunately buried under this different issue -- that it appears he is implying that the world cannot make sense in the current paradigm of physics.