H-1b, Non-Aggression Axiom, Men and Moral Philosophy

[jabowery]

In software since 1974, I'm one degree of separation from Bill Gates and 2 degrees from several other software industry billionaires.  

 

Do I have your attention?  

 

Good.

 

The two primary causes of the H-1b disaster are not addressed by the book "Sold Out":

 

1) "The Non-Aggression Axiom" is flawed and has resulted in government subsidy of wealth -- hence subsidy of the bad business practice known as rent-seeking.

 

2) Cultures with a long history at carrying capacity, such as those in Asia, are more highly evolved at rent-seeking -- whether in the public or private sector -- than are younger, individualistic cultures such as the US with its recently-ended land settlement.

 

Stefan should drop what he's doing and pay close attention to what I'm about to say since it is at the foundation of his moral philosophy:

 

Aggression is integral to sexual species -- particularly masculinity.  Failure to properly incorporate this into moral philosophy results in civilizations that are sexually and economically perverse.  Think about an immigration policy that admitted only young women without children.  Moral philosophers need to think about counterfactuals like this.  Why have they never even thought about this before?  Are they unaware of the importance of sex differences, territory and aggression?  Of course not.  They are aware of these things.  However they have never properly integrated it.  The reason, I would submit, is that moral philosophers are too "civilized" to imagine anything remotely resembling the real "the state of nature" out of which founding contracts might arise.

 

The founding contract of civilization, that no longer obtains, is a mutual insurance company with these terms:

 

I, an individual man, abjure my natural right to challenge other individuals to natural duel -- a natural right enjoyed by the males of all sexual species.  I will also come to the defense of the rights recognized as legitimate by this company.  In exchange, I am to be granted, upon reaching adulthood, one voting share and the dividends proceeding from the insurance premiums.

 

Note that this is a contract with _men_.  Every viable civilization starts out with some approximation of this contract and, with time, shifts toward taxation of economic activity to pay for the protection of property rights.  This shift subsidizes wealth which corrupts the wealthy and creates an evolutionary environment selecting rentiers.  Civilizations can remain in a moribund state for millenia cultivating ever more sophisticated rentiers.  Opening up to these cultures without correcting the non-aggression axiom is suicide.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Just curious, how long have you been listening to the show?

[grithin]

Your concept of how rent seeking affects society is over simplified.  Go read the 1979 book "The Evolution of Civilizations".

[jabowery]

Not having read "The Evolution of Civilizations" I cannot absolutely guarantee that Quigley failed to address the essential difference between eusocial force (war) and sexual force (natural duel) but if he did I'd like to see a cite.  Chapter and verse please.

[jpahmad]

So we should listen to you non-sense because you are "one degree of separation away form Bill Gates"?

[shirgall]

So we should listen to you non-sense because you are "one degree of separation away form Bill Gates"?

 

I'm one degree away and you guys listen to me sometimes.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

I'm one degree away and you guys listen to me sometimes.

 

Correlation!!!

[grithin]

Not having read "The Evolution of Civilizations" I cannot absolutely guarantee that Quigley failed to address the essential difference between eusocial force (war) and sexual force (natural duel) but if he did I'd like to see a cite.  Chapter and verse please.

Your notion of social contract is also oversimplified, but I only wanted to address one issue in your original post, and this was not in regards to war and sexual aggression, it was in regards to what you perceived as the singular effect of rent seeking optimization being a creation of a moribund state, whereas, in reality, excess has produced the environment for experimentation and progress.  I've suggested you read that particular book because it might help you correct  your over simplified idea of social contract, your idea of how civilizations evolve, and your idea of how rent seeking affects society.  But, given the nature of your response, and the looseness of your language in your posts, I doubt it.

[jabowery]

Your notion of social contract is also oversimplified, but I only wanted to address one issue in your original post, and this was not in regards to war and sexual aggression, it was in regards to what you perceived as the singular effect of rent seeking optimization being a creation of a moribund state, whereas, in reality, excess has produced the environment for experimentation and progress.  I've suggested you read that particular book because it might help you correct  your over simplified idea of social contract, your idea of how civilizations evolve, and your idea of how rent seeking affects society.  But, given the nature of your response, and the looseness of your language in your posts, I doubt it.

 

In any communication -- nowhere more so than in forum posts (or worse, tweets) -- the critique of "over simplification" is certain to be valid.  The key to good faith reading in such discourse is to grant the participants the benefit of the doubt and seek clarification with questions -- which can serve double duty as Socratic method.  In the present instance, I could take your use of "over simplified" to mean that:

 

1) The "excess" enjoyed by network effect businesses like Facebook, Microsoft (Windows), etc. does not substantially contribute to the H-1b corruption.  

2) I failed to appreciate the function of "excess" in providing leisure necessary to, for example, philosophy and other higher levels of abstract social structures.  

 

To illustrate civil discourse, I'll now ask the (possibly Socratic) question:

 

Did you intend #1 or #2?

 

 

[jabowery]

So we should listen to you non-sense because you are "one degree of separation away form Bill Gates"?

In the context of Stefan's most recent video on H-1b (which prompted me to post this), the answer would be, for reasons that should be obvious, "Yes."  For instance, Bill Gates and these other SV billionaires are the primary perpetrators of H-1b abuse.  Thus, the "Yes" is not due to the fact that this makes me more credible but because my perspective has access to pertinent information that may not be widely available.  If my position were then the party line of such interests ("Jobs western programmers won't do." "US education system has failed the STEM professions." etc.) then clearly I would not have contributed much and, even if my statements were true, they would contribute nothing new.  However, to have that close association with wealth and take a position that amounts to "Wealth has corrupted my wealthy associates." should be at least a little "surprising" -- enough, at the very least, to require it being discounted with amateur psychoanalysis, such as "envy", etc.

[jabowery]

I only wanted to address one issue in your original post, and this was not in regards to war and sexual aggression

Yes, I know.  However, you addressed it by telling me to go read a book -- a non-trivial demand on my limited time and resources.  My question regarding the book (whether it addressed the distinction between eusocial and sexual aggression) was to determine whether it would be worth it for me -- as well as establishing the degree to which the book was pertinent to the present discourse.  

 

As long as we're telling each other "go read a book before I consider you worthy of further discourse":

 

Read "The Social Conquest of Earth" by Edward O. Wilson for the best current understanding of the biological roots of civilization.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Just to back up grithin, The Evolution of Civilizations is the shit.

 

I'm also curious: the hell does Bill Gates have to do with any of this?

[RotYeti]

Can you define or explain what you mean by the non-aggression axiom?

[shirgall]

Can you define or explain what you mean by the non-aggression axiom?

 

My attempt at it is this: "No circumstance exists that justifies the initiation of force."

 

It is axiomatic because you cannot prove a negative.

[Jsbrads]

It isn't just physical aggression that creates dominance for men. Eloquence, leadership and productivity allow men to dominate without resorting to violence. Most chimp leaders groom smaller chimps. Larger rats intentionally lose wrestling matches a minority of the time to maintain status quo. The objective is to win more often, even the strongest man can be attacked from behind and subdued. To be sexually selected, a man has to win more than his competitors. Gentle force with a female, tight hugs that don't hurt, show physical capability in excess of her's and solidifies the male's position as protector.

[jabowery]

It isn't just physical aggression that creates dominance for men. Eloquence, leadership and productivity allow men to dominate without resorting to violence. Most chimp leaders groom smaller chimps. Larger rats intentionally lose wrestling matches a minority of the time to maintain status quo. The objective is to win more often, even the strongest man can be attacked from behind and subdued. To be sexually selected, a man has to win more than his competitors. Gentle force with a female, tight hugs that don't hurt, show physical capability in excess of her's and solidifies the male's position as protector.

Yes and none of that is inconsistent with what I said about the non-aggression axiom.

[grithin]

In any communication -- nowhere more so than in forum posts (or worse, tweets) -- the critique of "over simplification" is certain to be valid.  The key to good faith reading in such discourse is to grant the participants the benefit of the doubt and seek clarification with questions -- which can serve double duty as Socratic method.  In the present instance, I could take your use of "over simplified" to mean that:

 

1) The "excess" enjoyed by network effect businesses like Facebook, Microsoft (Windows), etc. does not substantially contribute to the H-1b corruption.  

2) I failed to appreciate the function of "excess" in providing leisure necessary to, for example, philosophy and other higher levels of abstract social structures.  

 

To illustrate civil discourse, I'll now ask the (possibly Socratic) question:

 

Did you intend #1 or #2?

 

 

 

The first "over simplified" was in regards to #2 (and that's not to say there aren't more efficient mechanisms than general excess to provide the innovation that such leisure has provided in the past), and the second was upon "I, an individual man, abjure my natural right to challenge other individuals to natural duel -- a natural right enjoyed by the males of all sexual species.  I will also come to the defense of the rights recognized as legitimate by this company." - where instead, societies are upon functional practices ingrained through cultures stemming from necessities and morals, and don't have the hard points of "will defend" or "will not inner-compete", which I suspect might be mentioned by you owing to either that general notion (will defence) from "natural law" or from your suggested ant book on eusocial evolution. 

 

I hadn't seen this particular response of yours, only the one on, go read "The Social Conquest of Earth".  I'm afraid the book did not improve my knowledge of how things have progressed since it seems to be for those who have somehow taken the notion that evolution worked upon projections of outcomes by individuals instead of the correct notion, which, to my knowledge, was first formerly presented and accepted by Ilya Romanovich Prigogine, that systems progress in a manner of accumulating persistence, and, in context, this means that a system, including both the individual as a system or a group of individuals as a system, will progress if their traits fit that particular situation in the time.

[Brad Sherard]

My attempt at it is this: "No circumstance exists that justifies the initiation of force."

 

It is axiomatic because you cannot prove a negative.

The non-aggression principle(It looks like it is sometimes called an "axiom" but otherwise indestinguishable from "principle") is formally defined as follows: The initiation of violence(between humans) is an invalid moral proposition. See here for the history of the concept: https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Principle_of_non-aggression

 

Axioms are indemonstratable but also apodictically undeniable propositions. Meaning they cannot be proven but they cannot be denied(and when I say "denied" I don't just mean they cannot be disproven, but even claimed to be false). The three propositional axioms are identity(A is A), non-contradiction(not A and the negation of A), and the excluded middle(A or the negation of A).

 

Propositions can be apodictic without being axioms. For example, if I say "Humans do not act" that is a performative contradiction, so it is apodictically false(it cannot even be assumed to be the case). However, it can easily be proved(via that very Reductio Ad Absurdum). So it is not indemonstratable. Axioms are ultimately irrational, meaning they cannot be analyzed further and pulled apart and have their logical pieced proven like other propositions. They are the base of the system in which we are contained(a la Gödel's incompleteness theorem). The above example proposition uses the non-contradiction axiom(through RAA) in order to disprove it. Axioms do not make use of proofs; only non-axiom propositions rely upon axioms.

 

So, the NAP is not axiomatic, because it can be proven(see UPB), it has constituent logical components that build up the proof of the conclusion.

 

Also, saying you cannot prove a negative is to assert that "no circumstance exists in which one can prove a negative" which is the form of what you define as being a negative(from your formulation of the NAP in your first line). So you are claiming that what you've stated cannot be proved.

[neeeel]

 

Axioms are indemonstratable but also apodictically undeniable propositions. Meaning they cannot be proven but they cannot be denied(and when I say "denied" I don't just mean they cannot be disproven, but even claimed to be false). 

 

Why not?

[shirgall]

Why not?

 

It's the (more formal) definition of an axiom.

[ofd]

It's the (more formal) definition of an axiom.

 

 

The definition is that an axiom is a premise that is taken to be true and that serves as a starting point for further investigations. It doesn't mean that it is true or can be proven to be true. That is also why different axioms lead to different systems in logic and math.

[jabowery]

The first "over simplified" was in regards to #2 (and that's not to say there aren't more efficient mechanisms than general excess to provide the innovation that such leisure has provided in the past),

There are many instances of "not enough" and "too much" in life. In the present day, we are well beyond the point of "not enough" -- particularly in the case of network effect businesses, so it was hardly much of an omission to focus on the "too much" end of the model.

 

and the second was upon "I, an individual man, abjure my natural right to challenge other individuals to natural duel -- a natural right enjoyed by the males of all sexual species.  I will also come to the defense of the rights recognized as legitimate by this company." - where instead, societies are upon functional practices ingrained through cultures stemming from necessities and morals...

Chief among these morals are those that keep society from disintegrating such as keeping one's word and -- just as important -- not imputing to people words they had not said and holding them to those words with "morals". The latter is what I am addressing.

 

I hadn't seen this particular response of yours, only the one on, go read "The Social Conquest of Earth".  I'm afraid the book did not improve my knowledge of how things have progressed since it seems to be for those who have somehow taken the notion that evolution worked upon projections of outcomes by individuals

...

I take it, then, that you dispute the conventional notions of natural selection as having been operative in the natural history of Earth. Is that correct?

 

the correct notion, which, to my knowledge, was first formally [ed jab] presented and accepted by Ilya Romanovich Prigogine, that systems progress in a manner of accumulating persistence, and, in context, this means that a system, including both the individual as a system or a group of individuals as a system, will progress if their traits fit that particular situation in the time.

It's fine to posit alternative theories of "creation" but it's one thing to recommend that people go read a book on the evolution of civilizations -- where we're dealing with the soft sciences -- and quite another to introduce a physics paradigm with biological relevance that overturns received theory. Please provide cite to a, hopefully concise, essay on the ways in which natural selection and your notion differ. Note, this requires something like what Nowak, Wilson, et al did in debunking the Hamilton inequality as the basis for explaining eusocial "altruism": They brought both the old and the new paradigm into the same universe of discourse so they could be commensurate and thereby rationally compared.

[grithin]

There are many instances of "not enough" and "too much" in life. In the present day, we are well beyond the point of "not enough" -- particularly in the case of network effect businesses, so it was hardly much of an omission to focus on the "too much" end of the model.

 

I suspect you have edited your main post since I am not seeing the statement which prompted me to suspect you failed to understand that an excess to select groups has been useful to civilization.  This failure to understand the previous utility to civilization was my original concern.  But, separately, "Beyond the point of not enough" is not addressing the principle of why a priest class has, in the past, evolved civilization.  The ability to expend excess towards uncertain endeavors provides the potential for unusual advancement.  And, if you were to apply this today, you would see this similarly applies, but now to corporations like space-x.

 

I take it, then, that you dispute the conventional notions of natural selection as having been operative in the natural history of Earth. Is that correct?

 

No.  I just understand it as a more general principle.