Bulbasaur

Let me give it a shot... Physical entities, matter and energy in their various forms, objectively exist. Feelings, thoughts, preferences, ideas, and concepts subjectively exist; we can say they exist in the sense that they are experienced, but only on a personal level, scoped to each individual (although they are emergent aspects of an underlying physical system, the brain, that does objectively exist). Concepts are generally an attempt to map to objective reality, both one-to-one (tree-concept maps to individual physical trees) and as collections of and/or relationships between objects (forest-concept maps to a proximity relationship between many trees). And one-to-one concepts are usually themselves "chunked" abstractions of collection/relationship concepts (a tree is really a collection of cells, which are themselves assemblies of molecules, etc.). Reality is objective, concepts are subjective, but subjective is not arbitrary. The map is not the terrain, but it attempts to say something true about it. It's easy to see that the one-to-one concepts map to objectively real things, because such things physically exist and can be directly observed. It's less obvious that more abstract higher-order relational concepts could, and this is the challenge with ethics. We do have subjective feelings about morality, which probably have roots in our evolutionary heritage, our early childhood experiences, ideas we're exposed to throughout our lives, etc. In that sense I suppose you could say that "morality exists subjectively," in the same way you could say that tree-concepts exist subjectively. But this is likely to be misunderstood as equivalent to "morality is (only) subjective." The crux of the debate is whether or not there is an objective moral reality to which one's moral concepts are attempting to map. I think the word "exists" has become a red herring. Philosophy is about what is true, and extant entities are only a subset of this. Truth includes higher-order relational abstractions about that which does exist and that which could exist, i.e. logic. Humans have subjective concepts of logical principles (which may or may not be flawed), and logical principles don't themselves exist as entities, but it would be absurd to argue that "logic is only subjective," because the result would so clearly contradict our real experience. Your subjective concept of morality is based on your feelings. The problem is, your concept of morality might be wrong. Progress of human knowledge has always been a matter of replacing people's feelings-based worldviews with empirical ones, because feelings-based worldviews are usually highly inconsistent with reality and logic. The fact that people base their worldviews on their feelings doesn't change the fact that there is a standard of objective truth with which their worldviews may or may not agree. The whole point of this show and this forum is that morality is not based on feelings, but on rational scrutiny of moral claims by subjecting them to the tests of logical consistency and universality. At the very least we can say that any moral claims which fail this test must be false, and as such, that there are objective moral truths.

This may be of interest (Tyson responds in the comments) http://horselesstelegraph.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/an-open-letter-to-neil-degrasse-tyson/

Liberty.me is the project, I think it just recently launched.

I don't doubt that you've given a lot of thought to your position with regards to minarchism, but I wonder if you've thought as carefully about the philosophical implications of accepting the necessity of evil? To me this is an extraordinary and extraordinarily troubling claim, and not a phrase to be used casually.

Agree with tasmlab. The "privatization" that's usually discussed is just government outsourcing; the government becomes a "customer" of private contractors, paying them with taxed/printed/borrowed money to provide some service in lieu of a government agency doing it. This basically merges the profit imperative of a corporation with the coercive power and lack of accountability of the state, so it's no wonder that the outcomes end up being generally worse even than the merely bureaucratic alternative. Of course, this bears no resemblance to a real private market where individuals make voluntary decisions about how to best spend their own money.

Funny, I had basically the same idea about two days ago. I envisioned more of a web application of multiple choice or agree/disagree questions than a video-conversation, but to the same end; walking users through their views on a series of morality concepts, with some branching based on answers given, and then at the end pointing out any contradictions between mutually exclusive answers and prompting users to choose only one to stand by. As the video mentions, adhering to statism relies on internal contradictions; using Socratic methods to lead people to think about them in terms of self-selected statements (and challenge them choose one or the other in order to proceed) seems like a great way to circumvent the defensiveness that springs up when simply processing someone else's statements. I think this need not be as difficult as he's suggesting, though. Something like 30 well-crafted questions presented to the user is probably sufficient, say covering 10 main concepts with 3 questions pertaining to each. Too many questions risks exceeding people's attention span. If each topic has its own self-contained flowchart, then it would avoid the enormity of 30+ levels of multiple branching. This could be promoted as something like the Myers-Briggs personality test; people seem to like questionnaires that purport to tell them something about themselves, and it would be important for avoiding the defensiveness that they don't go in seeing it as a challenge to their beliefs.

With the definitions I've used, where objective refers to the scope of a claim, an objective falsehood would just be any statement of a universal truth which is actually false, like "the universe was created by a flying spaghetti monster." But probably closer to what you have in mind is the definition of objective as that which is "real" or "actually exists." So you could say that hydrogen atoms are objective or exist objectively, and in that sense it doesn't make sense to be both objective and false (either they exist or they don't). But on the level of making claims about that which objectively exists, these can certainly be false. People are constantly making claims about the objective truth of gods, ghosts, spirits, souls, psychic phenomena, miracles, angels, extraterrestrials, and all sorts of things which they are unable to demonstrate and are very likely false. This is more what I was referring to. Clearly concepts like moral rules don't exist as physical entities, but I think concepts can be considered objective if they are non-arbitrary and refer specifically to the properties or interactions of physical entities (in other words, not just matters of opinion or imagination). For example, the rules of logic and mathematics or the models of physics would be objective whereas grammar rules of various human languages would be subjective. In that sense, as I think about it more, I guess I would consider methodologies like philosophy or scientific method to be objective as well, as long as they are rigorous and non-arbitrary. If one attempts to do philosophy but introduces irrational or arbitrary claims, they would end up using a partially subjective methodology instead. This would not mean that philosophy has 'become subjective,' only that the person has accidentally deviated from doing philosophy. Thanks for the discussion. I think this is a difficult topic, and it was helpful for me to try to collect my own thoughts and put them into writing.

I think it helps to step back and look at definitions of terms and how they're related, before looking at how philosophy comes into the picture. As I see it, there are two related but distinct dichotomies involved here: subjective/objective and true/false. These are all terms that apply to claims or statements (where a statement may be composed of several claims). Claims can be subjective and true, subjective and false, objective and true, or objective and false. I would define true and false as describing whether or not a claim is consistent with reality. Consistency with reality is not something we know automatically, but always relies to some degree on direct observation and experience (even a claim as fundamental as "I think, therefore, I am"). The truth or falsehood of a claim is thus distinct from our own ideas/beliefs/opinions about it. We may come to a wrong conclusion despite seemingly good reasoning, or we may be accidentally correct in spite of bad reasoning. I would define subjective and objective as describing the scope of a claim. Subjective claims are specific to an individual or group (local) and involve preferences and value judgments, whereas objective claims apply broadly to all of reality and all individuals (global) and are independent of any individual or group's preferences and values. A good subjective statement that Stefan likes to use is "I like ice cream." However, people very often tend to present subjective preferences and beliefs as objective claims, like "Mac is better than Windows." I would consider this pattern of subjective-presented-as-objective as the definition of "opinion." I would say that the difference distinguishing an opinion from a statement of fact is whether or not the claim has been critically examined by the person presenting it, and found to be well supported by evidence (of course we never reach 100% certainty, so fact/opinion is more of a gradient than a dichotomy). The issue of objective vs. subjective usually comes up with questions of morality. Theists like to claim the mantle of objective morality because their moral rules supposedly come from a divine arbiter and are thus independent of any human opinion. However, this actually makes theistic morality subjective; if moral rules exist entirely by fiat (divine or not), they are fundamentally arbitrary (a god's subjective preferences). A god could just as easily have chosen an entirely different or opposite set of moral rules, unless some real set of objective principles constrained it, in which case the principles exist in spite of the god rather than because of it. So objective morality is not only fully compatible with atheism, it in fact must be beyond the reach of capricious deities in order to be truly objective. So where does philosophy come in? Philosophy is a methodology, much like the scientific method. The scientific method is the process of working systematically from observations to arrive at judgments about the truth of objective claims about reality. If we want to judge whether a claim is true or false with any justified confidence, we must rely on direct observation of reality (assisted through technology) in conjunction with reason, logic, and math. The main difference between philosophy and science is what sort of claims are being addressed. Science attempts to determine the truth of claims about objective "is" (physics), while philosophy attempts to determine the truth of claims about objective "ought" (ethics). The philosopher probably has the much more difficult task since "ought" is about making choices, and choices are generally associated with matters of subjective preferences and values. It's much harder to see a moral "rule" as objective if I can simply choose to ignore it. Adding a God into the mix can introduce carrots and sticks to tempt and browbeat people into moral behavior, but it can't provide objectivity for the reasons given above. But if objective ethics do exist, we know that by definition they must apply universally to everyone, so many false moral systems can be immediately discarded on that basis alone. Finding correct objective ethics then requires finding those moral rules which are both universally applicable and logically self-consistent. This is the basic idea behind Stefan's approach of ethics as Universally Preferable Behavior. To ask whether a methodology like philosophy is objective I think is a misapplication of the term. Objectivity refers to the scope of claims, and philosophy is a means of assessing the truth of objective claims about "oughts." Whether one makes mistakes in their reasoning and arrives at incorrect conclusions is not really a matter of philosophy itself being subjective or objective, and wrongness and falsehood are not synonymous with subjective anyway, just as correctness and truth are not synonymous with objective. Hopefully this helps.

Does it sound great? If the government teaches us anything, it's that introducing violence into pursuit of change has opposite of the intended effect. Historically, political assassinations have generally led to consolidations of government power. I imagine if anything this will just facilitate the hostility toward bitcoin and toward anarchy and anarchists in general.

Deism is a subset of theism; they both share the defining characteristic of belief in a deity. They disagree on the qualities attributed to the deity, but this does not put deism somehow 'between' atheism and theism as a separate category. Theism is a broad umbrella that contains all the various types of deities that have been supposed throughout history; atheism is a little island that rejects all of them.

I'm not quite sure which lines you're referring to, but I got the chart from bitcoincharts.com. http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10zig6-hourztgSza1gEMAzm1g10za2gEMAzm2g21zv

Thanks, that seems like a much more levelheaded analysis than most of the headlines I've seen. I also just came across this, which gives a similar assessment: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1sbefw/chinese_investment_banker_says_what_nobody_in_the/

As an example, here is a chart of a 10/21 exponential moving average considering 6-hour timeframes. You can see a crossover occurred around 1050-1100 (had I been more attentive, I would have sold there). Update: It seems like this is the spark that started the firesale: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-06/bitcoin-slammed-baidu-suspends-payments-due-fluctuations Between this news and the accelerating downtrend, it looks like we're in for a big adjustment.

Nice little radio interview with a proud welfare recipient. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-11-30/other-america-taxpayers-are-fools-working-stupid

Moving average crossovers are popular trading strategies. Basically, you have a short-term trendline which is more responsive to short-term price changes and a long-term trendline which is less responsive to short-term price changes. When the short-term trend crosses above the long-term trend, traders buy in. When the short-term trend crosses below the long-term trend, traders sell and/or short. Many moving average crossovers have now been reached, for example the hourly, 2 hour, and 6 hour 10/21 EMA have all crossed. The 12 and 24 hour trends have not yet crossed. The shorter the timeframe, the more responsive the trendlines are to short-term trends. There may be many traders making decisions based on many different variants of these, but in general they will all serve to amplify trend reversals. For example, once a particular crossover is hit, everyone trading on that strategy will begin to sell and lower prices further. If this downturn continues, people following the slower indicators like 12 and 24 hour will also begin to sell. It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, other traders may be using different strategies which can counteract this. If this downtrend persists, I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of self-satisfied crowing in the media in the coming days, but I would take it with a grain of salt. The 'market price' is determined from exchanges where people are primarily trying to make a profit by trading. After a big sell-off, most of these people will just be waiting to put their USD back into BTC on the next uptrend. It doesn't necessarily mean that bitcoin has somehow 'failed.' I would also emphasize that these strategies are fundamentally reactive and not predictive. For example, news about Chinese banks may trigger a sell-off among people that aren't using technical analysis, but the people using these crossover strategies don't particularly care why the trends reverse. They just watch for it to happen and trade accordingly.