Metric

Altough it's easy to say that all taxes are inherently evil (which is true), I think there's an extremely obvious and pronounced "heirarchy of evil" when it comes to taxes. Something that would make a very interesting video to flesh out. Personal income taxes are by far the worst -- it's straight-up "fractional slavery." You're an asset of the government who forces you to report in every year on your profitability, and hand over whatever they tell you to. Property taxes are right up there as well -- if you have to continuously pay someone else to continue to own it, then you don't actually own it (another slave position). Import fees and the like are kind of "middle of the road" -- the individual doesn't get burned too badly, but the government is definitely staking out its territory and restricting what an individual can do when he crosses a border. Corporate income taxes and the "fair tax" seem *almost* legitimate, if you were to accept the legitimacy of the corporation. A corporation is a creation of the government with certain benefits, so paying the government in return for the liability shield they offer is *almost* a legitimate trade, and not very invasive to the average individual at all (he isn't forced to report to his owner every year with a bundle of cash -- he just pays higher prices when he trades with corporations).

Metric, I fail to see how you reduced the argument down to the risk of heavy metals against the benefits of the flu vaccine unless you completely ignored my posts (and therefore I'm wasting my time typing this!) As there is no reliable proof that vaccines provide any benefit and considerable evidence that vaccines can cause permanent injury ranging from developmental disorders to death, I think the argument boils down to whether or not you believe the mumbo jumbo that the medical cartel pushes on us. The anti-vax contingent is made up of those who believe that 1) vaccines are generally good but some are dangerous and need fixing and 2) those who believe that vaccines are completely unnecessary and at best useless but more likely harmful and occasionally, extremely so. The OP's position is that we should listen to faith-based, fear-induced propaganda and disregard all evidence to the contrary. I feel that this is a more reliable, quick summary of the argument. Sorry -- I should have specified that some people think vaccines are a new-world-order conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, and the government numbers are a PR fabrication dreamed up in a smoke-filled room somwhere. In that case, there is no real argument to be had, as no opposing data will be allowed into evidence. I'm not going to adopt the "everyone is lying but me" position -- I'm simply doing a poker player's EV calculation with the usual claims. If your kid gets the flu shot, he'll with 100% certainty be getting some nasty shit (including heavy metals) in small doses annually during his/her key developmental years, but you also "hit the jackpot" and save his life roughly one time in a million (according to their numbers). To me it just doesn't sound like an attractive trade at all -- as I said, maybe there are good counter-arguments to this position that would immediately change my mind, but no one has presented them here.

I think you have a fair point -- a-priori it's kind of remarkable that so many people could be so consistently wrong about so many things. But this is one of the first extraordinary claims that you encounter in life with lots and lots and lots of low-hanging, extraordinary proof. People tend to be so full of crap that at some point it becomes far easier to keep track of what they actually do know testably and reliably. BTW, for anyone who is unfamiliar, Feynman's famous speech "Cargo Cult Science" is a must-read related to this topic: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

Injecting heavy metals. Okay, evidence please..... Also you're equivicating flu shots with paint chips. And to top it off you are only mentioning flu shots but do you accept that vaccines are beneficial "other" than flu vaccinations? I don't get flu shots either because they seem a little frightning to me from all of the things going around, and that's probably a shame. Obviously it's a simplified analogy to point out the type of argument that is made. As for heavy metals, google it and you'll be buried with info. With other vaccines, you'd have to do a seperate risk/reward analysis -- you don't need a new Tdap shot every single year, and the payoff may be more significant.

Does this mean I have to believe everything any group of more than a thousand otherwise respectable people claim to believe? This is going to take some work...

I am not fully up on this debate, but as I understand it, no one here is claiming that the flu vaccine makes you more likely to die of the flu, or even that the benefits with respect to the flu are exactly, mathematically zero. The argument seems to be that injecting heavy metals into children every flu season during their key brain development years is not worth the very marginal improvement in overall risk of death (100 per year in a country of 300+ million is less than the childhood death rate due to brain cancer alone). Maybe there is a definative counter-argument for this, but it's not in the OP. To boil the argument down to the lowest common denominator, if eating paint chips off old houses gave you a 100% guarantee that your child would not die from the flu, would you have them do it?

Thanks for posting this -- a lot of it rings true.

If I can ever jump the hurdle into making youtube videos, this will be one of the first things I talk about. What I find fascinating is that Tarantino's last couple of movies have basically been "revenge fantasies" against bad ethics of the past, that were enforced by the governments at the time (Django and Inglourious Basterds). In Django, the role I found most fascinating was that of Samuel Jackson, the "Uncle Tom." He probably evoked more hate from the audience than anyone else in entire film, because of how utterly broken he was, and how he supported of the whole slavery system in spite of the fact it owned him and abused his people. So, in my mind, this trend of Tarantino's makes me wonder what future generations would look back on today with similar anger. And I think it would be the fact that we have abolished 100% slavery, but we went right back into "fractional slavery" (income tax), and applied it to everyone. And who would be the Uncle Tom? Everyone that pays taxes but supports the current paradigm -- including, ironically, Jackson and Tarantino themselves.

Incidentally, Matt Ridley just did a little talk for Reason that appeared today -- this guy is really a wellspring of fascinating economic/scientific insights.

I'm officially putting on some tin foil for this one, so there's naturally some uncertainty -- still, only a couple things have to be true for this to happen, so I want to note a real prediction that follows from a couple assumptions. First, we know there is evenutally going to be a massive economic downturn when the bond bubble eventually bursts, and there is a pretty reasonable chance it will happen within the next year (basically, the bottom end of this trip through the business cycle could trigger it, and that is due to happen soon). This will be very, very bad for government interventionists types, and reveal a great deal of folly -- it is exactly what anarchist/libertarian/tea-party types have been loudly predicting since the last financial crisis. So far, no tin foil. However, if you assume that certain people in power are willing to kill a lot of people to create a smoke screen to blame the opposition (rather than allow them to reap all the credibility and potential political power), the time is approaching for them to do it. In other words, the conditions are perfect for a false-flag terror attack, to be blamed on anarchist/libertarian/tea-party types, who "want a revolution" or want to "end the fed" or whatever -- and it would have to be big. Not "school shooting" scale, but national economy scale. I.e. it would have to be big enough to plausibly blame an economic crisis on the whole liberty movement, painting them as the destroyers of the economy. So, I don't know what probability to put on this scenario playing out, but if it was going to happen, I would definitely expect to see it happen within the next year, just before (or at the very beginning of) a new financial crisis. I've never made a prediction like this before, and just want to make sure it is "out there" for the record.

Just to invite more feedback, did the title "Truth" really wow anyone here in a positive way?

Do you think the average potential viewer will understand the distinction you're making, if you don't explain it to them first? People who are already philosophers might get it right away, but for a film directed at a wider audience it might not be as clear. That's an important point. But also, just in general, it seems pretty risky to adopt a title that A) is generic enough to tell you nothing at all about the subject matter, combined with B) implying a judgment call about how "good" it is. Maybe in this case the title is essential -- the contents plays on the title in a clever way, or something. So maybe it's secretly a brilliant choice in a way that we're just not in a position to judge at the moment. But from where I'm standing right now, I just can't see what this title does in a powerful way, except to generate eye-rolls from those unfamiliar. As an example in the opposite direction, I found "the tyrrany of illusion" to be a far more intriguing title, and relevant to the subject matter.

I tend to agree with both of you, from a purely PR perspective. If I knew nothing else about it, I'd feel some of the same impressions I might have about a movie called "Good Movie."

RIght, string theory is not experimentally confirmed, though it's been ongoing research for close to 40 years, now -- plenty of lives of brilliant people have been invested into this thing, and the reality of the situation becomes more uneasy with each passing year. And there are problems of falsifiability -- it is not clear if it is even possible to do an experiment that would rule out string theory (leading to basic questions of its status as science). Basically, it's the biggest gamble in the history of theoretical physics -- it might end up with an enormous payoff somewhere down the line, but there's also a good chance that it won't. Of course, there were good motives for taking a look at this kind of thing -- one thing that is known for sure is that the current "standard model" can't be the end of the story, and string theory seemed a promising way to get to a next generation of understanding. But now the program appears to be going nowhere fast (from the point of view of a non-specialist like myself). Well my understanding of it is, that it was a try to find a model that can describe black holes (or singularities) without contradictio, as realitvitiy and quantumtheory seem to collide there in a way that is unresolvable by each seperat model. But if that's true then I understand the reason for the theory even less, as, if GR is true, what goes on inside a black hole can't ever be observed/verfied or analysed anyway, so, why bother if current models don't describe that? Also I don't see how the word "understanding" would fit into Stringtheory, as to me (as a layman) it seems more like making up a good-sounding (and mathematically accurate)story that fits the data (much like the ptolemic model). I mean it seems like QM and GR leave this empty shape in the wall and now they use some cardboard and drawing to close it up. Again, this all comes from a layman understanding/perspective of what's going on and to come back to the OT, it seems rather a problem of metaphysics and epistemology than anythign else. String theory isn't so much about what goes on inside black holes. You're right that if that were the exclusive domain of the theory, it wouldn't really tell you much of anything at all. It is supposed to go much further than that -- to basically fix quantum field theory (getting rid of infinities that ordinarily have to be swept under the rug in a process called renormalization), predicting new classes of particles that could be observed, and giving a sensible quantum theory of gravity that can be used everywhere (not just inside black holes). It was supposed to do this all at once, and indeed it has many good characteristics that suggest it can do this. The problem is that nothing the theory predicted was unique (giving rise to the non-falsifiability problem), and even the new particles that were supposed to be relatively easy to detect have not shown up in experiments. Some people are still very committed to it, though, giving rise to the increasingly extreme and unprecedented "gamble" I mentioned before.

RIght, string theory is not experimentally confirmed, though it's been ongoing research for close to 40 years, now -- plenty of lives of brilliant people have been invested into this thing, and the reality of the situation becomes more uneasy with each passing year. And there are problems of falsifiability -- it is not clear if it is even possible to do an experiment that would rule out string theory (leading to basic questions of its status as science). Basically, it's the biggest gamble in the history of theoretical physics -- it might end up with an enormous payoff somewhere down the line, but there's also a good chance that it won't. Of course, there were good motives for taking a look at this kind of thing -- one thing that is known for sure is that the current "standard model" can't be the end of the story, and string theory seemed a promising way to get to a next generation of understanding. But now the program appears to be going nowhere fast (from the point of view of a non-specialist like myself).

This is purely a matter of efficiency, and the fact that you have limited amount of time in your life. I do not want to spend the first 60 years of my life reproducing what Newton did from a series of careful experiments, so that I can then begin considering the next step. Of course, if there is a compelling reason to go back and start again from first principles, it can be an important thing to do -- but it would be a waste to make everyone do that at every single stage of their education, and rob from them the benefit of the intervening discoveries and theoretical construct. That said, modern students actually do many, many experiments in the course of their education to keep them grounded in the reality of the science. However, the main use is that of an illustration -- it is not to force them to re-derive all of physics as it currently exists. That would be a monumental undertaking no human could complete. I think you misunderstood RoseCodex (and Harriman) here. The point is not to start physics from scratch, but that, when doing science, one should start with evidence/data/experiments and then try and make a model using those experiments as a foundation. Harriman (as far as I understand him) cirtiques that models/theories are formed without any data backing them up in particular and then having experiments to either try to confirm or reject those models/theories. An so reversing the process from inductive (generalizing/abstracting a theory from the data at hand) to deductive (trying to find data after a theory has already been proposed). iirc Harriman tells the story here of Newton and Descartes both trying to come up with a theory/model for how light works. Where Newton experimented first before he even bothered to come up with a theory and Descartes just thought something up and then tried to see if really fits that or not afterwards. I think String theory would be an excellent showcase for that, as its based in literally nothing as far as I know, so they invent a theory (or rather a theoretical thing and its properties) and now they seem to try and tweak it until it fits the data. Or that's at least my understanding of it. I was responding to his philsophy of teaching science as it was directly written -- he was pretty clearly saying that theory (equations) shouldn't be taught until you've first "started with" the necessary experiments and thought for a good long bit about what might be the cause. And I'm saying that's hopelessly inefficient for being brought up to speed on the current status of science. Of course when you decide to specialize in something, you then connect with the experiments surrounding your specialty in a deep way, but we've only got one lifetime here. To the more general point you are discussing, of course you want feedback between theory and experiment taking place in the practice of science, and it's a sign of unhealthy science when one or the other is lacking for a very long time -- that's common knowledge. However, there's nothing in principle wrong with postulating next-generation theories to solve long-standing problems (e.g. what string theorists do) -- it's just that they get increasingly likely to be wrong, the farther they get from experimental feedback. They're certainly welcome to invest their life in that kind of theoretical field, though, as long as they understand the risks inherent in that kind of research.

This is purely a matter of efficiency, and the fact that you have limited amount of time in your life. I do not want to spend the first 60 years of my life reproducing what Newton did from a series of careful experiments, so that I can then begin considering the next step. Of course, if there is a compelling reason to go back and start again from first principles, it can be an important thing to do -- but it would be a waste to make everyone do that at every single stage of their education, and rob from them the benefit of the intervening discoveries and theoretical construct. That said, modern students actually do many, many experiments in the course of their education to keep them grounded in the reality of the science. However, the main use is that of an illustration -- it is not to force them to re-derive all of physics as it currently exists. That would be a monumental undertaking no human could complete.

Metric, while I do find it incredibly amusing to have my "motives" discerned so smugly, I'd rather stick to the actual topic. Science is about explaining phenomena rationally, i.e. providing physical mechanisms to explain physical phenomena. The closest you are getting to a field as practiced would be "theory" (as practiced by the subset of scientists known as theorists). A theorist may do some of what you describe, but a theorist does a lot of other things -- predict new phenomena from fundamental principles, etc. However, most science is experimental, and is not spending its time looking to explain well-known phenomena by "providing physical mechanisms." Of course, you will try to get around this by implicitly redefining "science" -- I will refer to your definion as "siense" to avoid confusion with what is done by scientists. And then you say, Wait a sec.... Do we define them so that they can be used consistently or do we define them as whatever feels right (convenient) to us? Don't give us the run-around here. You realize that these are not mutually exclusive, right? There are an infinity of ways to set up consistent definions -- a scientist's job is to pick a convenient one for describing phenomena and get on with the science. If someone else wants to use a different set of definitions, that is completely fine (perhaps slightly inconvenient). Just as long as they are clear about their definitions to avoid confusion, they can talk back and forth and get on with the real and lasting contributions to human knowlede (which isn't the choice of terminology itself). Example: Defining the word "planet" and then checking to see if Pluto fits the definition is not science. It is just a matter of setting terminology. This is why there is ironic humor in phrases like "when I was your age, Pluto was a planet." It is understood that nature doesn't care about your definitions. An example of actual science would be measuring/calculating the mass of Pluto. It is a number that may play into your definition of planet, but fundamentally it doesn't care how you define "planet" -- it is science, and it lives on regardless of your definitions.

Once again, you are using an extremely non-standard definion of "science" that doesn't correspond to what scientists actually do. I completely understand why you would like to co-opt the word for yourself, rather than bothering to use your own word. The motives are rather obvious to everyone. Incidentally, I agree that keeping consistent defintions is important -- however, the point is that it is arbitrary. It is possible to describe the same phenomenon using two different sets of terminology. Thus, the science (in the sense used by scientists) is not in the the terminology -- the terminology is just a tool (defined however you find convenient) for conveying the real and lasting thing -- the actual science.

He (ie Northern Rock Building Society) took a government bailout, so.... has he got any credibility? Suggest him to Stefan anyway: [email protected] I am operating under the assumption that Stefan will visit this thread if he needs interview ideas. If ideas are suggested via email when the time is not right, it is likely they will immediately end up in the round file.

Point is, they cannot even begin to determine whether or not a virus is alive without first defining the term life. And even if they did bother to do so, it would be a complete waste of time, because someone else would simply offer up another definition. Discovering new phenomena is science -- definitions can come and go, but the phenomena remain observable pieces of nature. You need not consult terminology to delve deeper -- you can consult nature directly. Playing around with terminology is something entirely different, and much more akin to "fashion" -- it is subject to whim, preference, and inevitably changes with time.

Standard sucker's game, like demanding a bunch of artists be on the same page with their definition of art. The word is not used in a prescriptive way -- it's just a convenient catch-all term for a subject whose boundaries are a matter of convention rather than provided by nature. Is a virus alive? How about a prion? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless of your answers, they are still appropriate subjects for biologists to discover things about.

Matt Ridley, who did the famous Ted talk "When Ideas Have Sex." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley

This tech is advancing quickly. Demonstration of a new printable AR design that does not break after 600+ rounds of high-speed testing.

I can resolve this paradox rigorously, although I don't know whether I'm using game theory. Suppose there are 100 people. Each individual who pollutes will gain $10. If no-one pollutes, there is a net gain to their society of $2000. One person runs a DRO, and offers $19 to each of the other 99 people provided that (a) they stop polluting, and (b) the DRO receives the $2000 net gain, but © the agreement is void unless all 99 people sign up. This doesn't work, because some of the people think "The DRO will never get all 99 people to sign up, so I won't bother". As a result, only 95 people sign up and the net gain isn't realised. So the following year, the DRO guy tries something more sophisticated. Like a true entrepreneur, he decides to risk some of his own money. He says to the other 99 people: "I will pay you $11. It's yours to keep, with no strings attached, if you (a) stop polluting, and (b) agree that my DRO receives the $2000 net gain if everyone stops polluting. In addition, I will pay you a further $5 if everyone signs up." This succeeds. If every polluter can gain $10 by polluting or $11 by not polluting, of course they will each agree individually to not pollute. Because everyone prefers $11 to $10, everyone signs up and stops polluting. The DRO guy receives the $2000 net gain. From that, he takes $11 for himself per person (to reimburse himself for the money that he risked by paying everyone $11 up-front with no strings attached), then he pays everyone the extra $5 bonus because everyone signed up, and the remaining $400 is his profit. We can then consider a society with two DROs who are competing to get people to stop polluting. Naturally they will cut their profit margin, in order to persuade as many people as possible to sign with them. So maybe only $100 of the non-pollution "windfall" will go to the winning DRO as profit. But now, each DRO will have signed up some of the people. Obviously it is now in the economic interest of both DROs to combine their lists, win the $2000 net gain, and split it between them. This whole apparent paradox is resolved so much more neatly and so much more profitably than the statist solution, where the government bans everyone from polluting, except for those who lobby hard enough and donate enough money to it, and except for some of its own government departments who continue to pollute. Very nice. I'll have a go at modeling this in game theory terms, and also look at the Hoppe article linked by Mr. Capitalism. If it all goes together nicely, generalizes well, and is an under-appreciated point at mises.org and elsewhere (i.e. Hoppe etc. hasn't already scooped us), I wouldn't mind writing or possibly co-writing an article for mises.org with you about this point. Incidentally, "argument c" above is probably independently true, and can probably be modeled quite easily. One basic issue is that the "bribing government" move probably has a relatively fixed cost, while government regulation is presumably a cost that is proportional to the amount of your output. Thus the bribe move is profitable for "big business" but not for the mom and pop -- this means that "big business" gets a market advantage that thends to destroy mom and pop, and thus the "bribe move" becomes more and more important in the economy, eventually leading to a fascist sort of economy dominated by big business (sound familiar?). It will be cool to see this work in a little toy game theory model.