Metric

And this would be argument c) (to be fair it should have been argument a) since you responded first ). That altough the game may accurately represent a real problem in real life, the "state solution" is actually not really a solution (it is only assumed to be without examination), as it inevitably changes and expands the game in such a way that the problem becomes worse, not better.

I don't remember where I saw it (somewhere in mises.org), but I'll try to paraphrase the answer until/if I find it. But the underlying statement in the "tragedy of the commons" type of arguments is that the net benefit of collective action far outweighs the costs acruing to any individual participant. Or put more simply, that there is a profit to be found in solving the problem of the common (in this case air polution). The argument rephrased is that private profit seeking individuals will be unable to exploit a profitable situation, even though there is a stated economic gain in solving the problem. Tom Woods jokingly give a sort of answer. So in terms of game theory, the game has to be generalized in some way to allow for additional plays, as the standard type of game (see link in OP) is artificially restricted (only two moves are possible -- cooperate or not). This definitely makes sense, as there seems to be massive profit potential to be exploited in some way, and there exists enormous creativity in sophisticated free markets. The non-excluable, non-rival axiom of the game is the way the narrow range of possibilities are justified -- so one may be able to argue one of the following points a) no such non-excludable, non-rival situation actually exists in real life or b) the non-excludable, non-rival axiom doesn't actually translate into the commonly accepted limitations on the game.

Just to clarify, I welcome any opinions on this matter -- not only explicit game theory solutions. :-)

So, some people including Stef spend a lot of time talking about DRO's and other ways that markets can solve traditional problems of the state. Basically, I think these arguments would be supercharged if they could be used to construct solutions to "collective action problems" in game theory language, since this seems to be a major justification for statism amongst sophisticated statists. Is there a way to cram a "DRO strategy" (or whatever you want to call it) into game theory language, and show that it can resolve long-standing problems? For example, I know that Stef and others have claimed that DRO's represent a solution to air quality, which is a textbook collective action problem -- it would be super awesome to see this put into game theoretic language and resolve the paradox (that it is profitable/rational for each individual actor to pollute, even though there is a huge net value gain if everyone cooperates and does not pollute). Here is an intro to the collective action problem by a guy who does a lot of "intro to game theory" youtubes:

No, don't you get it? It takes 16 years of government spending and war to end a recession (unless it's 1920, which it isn't). Just imagine how bad things would have gotten without the government. Japan is right on track for an economic miracle any day now -- they've been doing everything right except the war, so it takes them a little longer.

I sympathize with your sentiment -- it's a basic test of economic sanity when you're effectively talking about banning low-skill workers from working, and seeing 70% support for it is sort of like watching natives crap in their own villiage water supply. At some point you definitely feel the urge to withdraw from people with that mindset.

Being an atheist doesn't require belief of any kind. Someone who has never heard of the idea of "god" is an atheist -- specifically an "implicit atheist" (google it). So being an atheist certainly doesn't require a rejection of scientific thinking.

Are you trying to say that atheists are those who think there is 51% probability that God doesn't exist? That would actually be scientific in my opinion. But that's not what the "official" definition of atheist is, I think. I'm saying why even waste our time with these verbal labels when we can go right to the precise %'s? I do not understand people's need to take the %'s, make up words that go with the %'s and then get in endless arguments about which words go with which %. Who cares? All I need to know is the % itself. The rest is, to me, pointless confusion and distraction. Do we want to know precisely what someone believes? Or do we find it more important to debate which name goes with that belief? I just care about the belief itself and the % pinpoints that. And I also find it revealing when someone refuses to just focus on the %'s and keeps trying to create confusion with the words. It really shows what their priority is. I mostly agree -- it's far better to just state your position, if you're trying to be precise. But we have these pre-built words that are supposed to mean something, and various factions want to strategically shift the meaning of the labels (mostly without being explicit about it) in order to make the opposing factions seem absurd. So the endless arguments and confusion are sort of by design -- it happens because clarity on the issue is not in the best interest of the majority.

If you define an atheist as "someone who makes an absolute and positive claim that there is no god, over all possible consistent definitions of god," then the above makes some sense. However, that's a very non-standard definition which is often used as a straw man by religious types -- it applies to no self-described atheist that I've ever actually met. In the more standard terminology (which actually does describe every atheist I know), atheist simply means "not a theist" (i.e. not someone who is actively claiming belief in a god). Until very recently I used to claim the "agnostic" label, just to make it extra-super-clear that I wasn't taking the "positive claim about all possible gods" type of position, but I've been won over by some threads discussing the terminology, here -- there's really no need to go out of one's way to accomodate positions that are only used as straw men. Just use the word as it is commonly understood by nearly every atheist, "no positive theistic beliefs," which is by far the most conservative position in terms of knowledge claims.

Just imagine that you lived in Venezuela when you made this post, and had $10,000 at that time. If that $10,000 was sitting in a local bank, as of today it's worth roughly $6,666 in terms of international buying power. If that $10,000 was in gold in your personal safe, though, it is now a lot more valuable in terms of the local currency, but is roughly the same in terms of international buying power. Point being that if you own gold, it doesn't really matter if they replace an old, dead currency with a new devalued one designed to fleece you for some percentage of your savings and keep the government solvent.

We could already maybe say, that there are programs that are "self aware," these are programs that recursively modify their own code. Everything that they do happens deterministically. I'm sorry, but this does not follow, unless you can prove that free will comes from self awareness (or whatever you are trying to say by I think, therefore I am) Yes, this is an excellent point, along with the OP. Sure, there is something you can call "free will," but it could equally well apply to a deterministic computer. If the computer has a basic model of itself, its environment, and it acts in the world to fulfill its preferences (making a rational calculation of "if I do X, then the outcome is better for me than if I do Y"), then it can be said to have free will. It's just a matter of having reasonable definitions.

That sums it up quite well. I still have the dualboot because my pc is a bit sluggish for much VM use and I do need to use proprietary software at times; however, I spend the majority of time running Linux. It still does take a bit of a tinker to becoming a Linux power-user, but it takes much less time than it used to in order to achieve competency. @emptyblessing: Great pic and so true. DIY personal computers are easy enough to build at home. Failing that, there are plenty of almost-cheap websites that will send you a mediocre build without too much of a mark-up. Even most of the upper eschelon of name-brand pc manufactures don't charge the apple premium. It's just amazing how anyone could justify that cost with a strait face. And no, to anyone who would insist, their laptops are not an exception. Their heat problems are notorious and cannot out-perfom even lesser-spec'd counterparts due to the fact they'll simply burn out. The mobile devices (iphone, ipad) are about the only reasonable place they have an edge, but frankly the android competition is better for all but a narrow niche of applications.

Can you elaborate on this please? I don't understand what the cluster personality is. Also, I don't understand how men are "holding all the cards." And yes, women are miserable now. In jobs they hate. In debt. Depressed. Seperated from their children. Lonely. Preyed upon by the vanity markets. "Cluster B" are a bunch of related personality disorders. I think you'll understand my meaning immediately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder#Cluster_B_.28dramatic.2C_emotional_or_erratic_disorders.29 Anyway, in the world market, American men are highly desirable. They make an effort to treat their women right, are typically highly educated, etc. American women, however, have the reputation you know about -- and you're not the only one who knows about it. Their market for men is very limited to American men who aren't aware of their options (and who are becoming less willing to marry them as time goes on). As an example, try to imagine some Chinese guy putting up with the cluster B nonsense, and ask yourself how likely that is to happen. On the flip side, Chinese women are often super-classy, fit, enlightened people without the chip on their shoulder. BTW, I realize all this is generalizing horribly, and there are many exceptions on all sides. But we're talking about reputation/perception, what it brings you in the relationship market, and why you can and should simply ignore the manipulative name-calling.

My initial reaction to this is "who cares," but I guess it's also true that a lot of men haven't yet figured out they are actually holding all the cards, at least in this country (it took me a long time to realize this as well). If you're a decent American guy, you have many, many options for fostering a quality relationship -- those "cluster B personality" chicks who are masters of the put-down really do not. Pity is more appropriate than fear, here.

A great thing about linux is that it's trivially easy to set up a dual-boot configuration alongside an existing windows installation. You don't ever need to go cold turkey -- you just gradually find yourself booting to linux more and more until you have complete and total contempt for the windows installation. And, of course, there's all that stuff about being *free* (along with huge repositories of free software) and never having to think about viruses again.

As Far I'm understoof Metric is talking about Logical determinism which is merely a description of true false statements. Metric is this the only type of determinism you are identified with or are there others? AFAIK Arius refers to Theological Determinism or Predeterminism aka ALL events are predetermined (only one possible future outcome). Feel free to correct If In understood something wrong. Sorry to have taken so long to reply, as I've been busy for the last 10 days or so and wanted to avoid getting pulled into long forum discussions. When I say "determinism" I refer to deterministic time evolution (aka "unitary time evolution"), as encoded in the laws of physics as presently understood -- the one-to-one relation between past and future states of the universe (presumably this is roughly what a philosopher would call predeterminism). However, the objection raised in the previous discussion (as I understood it) was basically that philosophy can't work in a deterministic universe, because this one-to-one evolution rules out a working definition of truth/falsity. So as a counterexample to this claim, I defined a notion of truth/falsity which works regardless of how time evolution takes place. I do not know how a philosopher would characterize this approach in terms of logical determinism -- I am basically just saying that truth/falsity/philosophy doesn't need to depend on the unnoticable microscopic details of how time evolution works in our universe. It would be cool if you could translate that position into philosophy-speak.

I just have to note again how much this bothers me (I am sure this wasn't your intention) -- but I have to say that something feels very wrong, if you can be driven to this conclusion based on tiny, unnoticable details in the laws of physics. You are one of the universe's ultimate badasses -- seemingly tiny variations in your brain involving little electrical impulses we call your "thoughts, preferences, and will" are amplified in a magnificent process that shapes the future in a profound way, regardless of the details (whether or not there is an exact one-to-one correspondence between the "now" in your head and the shape of the future -- it still happens!). It seems tragic to build a pit for yourself based on an issue like this one.

Non-deterministically, there are multiple states of reality which do not violate the laws of physics. Deterministically, there is exactly one state of reality which does not violate the laws of physics. Constructing a conceptual model which does not represent an existent object or the behavior of existent objects will not mitigate this problem. No, the state space is not one-dimensional -- you snipped the part where I explicitly noted otherwise. It is typically enormous for all physical systems. This is something you can look up (google "phase space") -- I am using a standard definition which applies to all physical systems. Basically, you're trying to inject dynamics into something already well-defined without it, and this is why you are repetedly confusing the notions of "state" and "state space" and ending up with a fragile philosophy at the end. By "laws of physics" in the above, I mean the instantaneous laws of physics at a single time -- stuff you could tell by looking at a single snapshot of a situation. Poetic, but you're using a bunch of words in a vague way, with the consequence that you're driven to some weird kind of nihlism where you view yourself as a rock under the most scientifically likely scenarios. I suggest that just as an excercise, you start building a notion of truth, falsity etc. that will work well regardless of the form of time evolution, and then compare it to your old one (if the old one is even well-defined) to see if it is really lacking any essential qualities. I suspect you'll find that the new one is at least as good as the old one.

No, it really doesn't -- let me get a little more explicit. The state space of "you" includes many possible states (possible as in "arrangements not violating the laws of physics") -- some in which you have a "heads" answer, and some in which you have a "tails" answer. We can define correctness on the state space as a correlation between your answer and the coin. Note that this notion of correctness is defined on the state space. You have noted that we need some kind of space with more than one dimension in order to differentiate "correct" from "incorrect," and I am pointing out that the place to make the definition is in the state space, which is defined (in principle) for all physical systems, and has many dimensions. Now, once we have this notion of correct and incorrect, we may ask what is the actual state of the system, which has a single answer. Does it lie in the "correct" part of the state space, or the "incorrect" part (or perhaps some third, random part of the state space that contains all the atoms in an incoherent jumble)? And this has a well-defined answer, which is trivially easy to check in practice. This construction has good properties -- it is precise, it is practical, it matches well with intuition, it is ideally suited for philosophical discussions involving physics, and it doesn't involve time evolution at all. You can specify time evolution however you like (deterministic, probabilistic, non-deterministic, dictated by the whim of Jebus, whatever) and it will still be a perfectly well-defined construction. If at some time before the guess was made there was only one possible future, or there were many possible futures is just not relevant to this notion of correctness or truth.

You're again jumping to a description of the future before you've resolved the same problem for the present. I have a coin, which has been flipped, but I'm not telling you whether it's heads or tails. So you have to guess -- let's say you write your guess down on a napkin. Whether or not your guess is "correct" does not depend at all on the details of time evolution -- your correctness (or lack of it) is a property of the present time only, since it can be revealed by examining only one snapshot of the world at the present time, e.g. comparing the state of the coin to the state of the napkin. Thus, "correctness" does not depend on the details of time evolution -- it can be defined in a robust way. From a technical point of view, I think you are confusing "the state" with the "state space." The state space is the space of descriptions of a thing -- these can be compared one to another. Some of them may include napkins with correct answers, and some with incorrect answers. The actual state is just one of these.

This line of thinking has nothing to do with determinism -- if the present is described by a single state, then it cannot possibly be another state. So you have already run into your philosophical problems before we even get to talking about the future and deterministic time evolution. Of course I think that once you have resolved the issue for the description of the present (incomplete information about the present results in many alternate descriptions of the present, regardless of the fact that only one can be correct), you will have also resolved it for the description of the future with a little bit more thought.

As was noted before, Stefan did change the board policy on this subject something like two years ago. Of course I do agree with you that people should discuss this issue if they are having problems processing the implications for philosophy, and this includes Stefan. No one needs a philosophy of life, ethics, psychology etc. that is vulnerable to falling completely apart, depending on some small detail of the final form of the laws of physics.

This is just what you do when examining any scenario with incomplete information -- it doesn't require the context of discussing the future or time evolution. When you have incomplete information about the state of a system existing in the present, you describe all the "possibilities" which are consistent with the information you have, even if you know there is only one reality at present. Describing the future is really no different -- we describe many possible futures because of uncertainty. Where uncertainty is less, you imagine fewer possible futures. Where uncertainty is greater, you imagine more. This will continue to be the case even if there is a violent upheaval in fundamental physics. It's not fragile. This is all just standard science -- you don't need to carve out an exception. Science isn't so much about proof (in the mathematical sense of ending all debate) so much as it is about the most powerful and accurate theory consistent with the data. And that includes deterministic time evolution, after centuries of putting such theories to the test. It's not "proof" but it's about as good as humans get with such ideas.

What we know for sure is that argumentation is essential for the normal operation of humans (i.e. the future depends crucially on the outcome of logical arguments), and this remains true regardless of the form physical law takes. Whether or not you deem it to be "valid" is a different issue. BTW, QM is not "additional" -- QM means that nature does not behave according to classical mechanics. Yet classical mechanics still perfectly useful as an approximation for bridge builders -- we know, because it works. Classical mechanics isn't fragile, though you can always accuse it of being wrong from a fundamental point of view. I suggest that good and useful philosophy should be crafted in a similar way -- you don't want it to be fragile, but remain useful as an excellent approximation even with a limited knowledge of reality.

Coming to terms with counter-intuitive truths about nature is always a case of the former. Are you saying there is some kind exception in this case?