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The Big Questions
Those authors' books typically marshall a large amount of research data and evidence in support of a thesis that seems contrarian but turns out to be probably true. The Big Questions (released November 3rd with a companion website and blog doesn't do that. The book is divided into many self-contained vignettes and side topics and independent arguments, which are based more on logic and reasoning than externally gathered evidence, and the arguments don't always convince you of the conclusions. But that's part of the fun: many of the arguments in the book are structured so rigorously, almost like mathematical proofs, that if you disagree the conclusion, the challenge is to figure out why you think the conclusion is wrong. (Nobody ever scribbled equations in the margins of Malcolm Gladwell's books trying to figure out if he was "right".)
You'll probably enjoy the book the most if the following are true for you:
- You enjoyed math all the way through high school, especially the paradoxes that seemed to grow out of elementary rules of logic or probability. Sometimes the paradoxes resulted from a flaw in one of the reasoning steps, so that identifying the flaw led to a deeper understanding of how to conduct those steps. And sometimes there really is no flaw in the reasoning, so that the conclusion, no matter how counterintuitive, must be true.
- Eventually, though, you ran out of "paradoxes" that could be described in the language of intermediate mathematics. There are other paradoxes lurking in mathematics, of course (like the celebrated Banach-Tarski paradox), but most of them require you to learn so much mathematics just to understand the paradox, that there aren't enough hours in the day.
- So, you'd be delighted to discover paradoxes in an entirely new field, where arguments built from elementary rules of logic, lead to a conclusion that seems at first to make no sense, but leads to a deeper understanding the more you think about it.
The core philosophy of The Big Questions -- not embodying any of the conclusions, but rather the rules of the game by which those conclusions should be reached -- is expressed in two lines near the end:
If you're objecting to a logical argument, try asking yourself exactly which line in that argument you're objecting to. If you can't identify the locus of your disagreement, you're probably just blathering.
(This quote makes Landsburg sound grumpier than he is; at this point in the book,
he's just coming off of describing
an exhausting round of e-mail argument with another professor who he felt was not playing
by these rules.) I've believed this passionately for a long time, and to me it seems
trivially true anyway: If an argument is organized into a series of steps, and you disagree
with the conclusion, then some step in the argument must be the first step
you disagree with, and if the author feels like each step in their argument follows by
airtight logic from the previous step, then that's the point at which one of the two
players is wrong.
There's nothing
more exasperating to me than writing what I think is a well-reasoned logical argument,
sending it to the intended audience, and getting back a reply which makes it obvious that
the recipient simply read my conclusion, disagreed with it, cleared their throat, and
started typing out paragraphs describing their own view. Which they're entitled to,
but they missed the point -- I was hoping that if they disagreed with my argument, they
could pinpoint exactly what part they disagreed with. (If they had replied with
their own argument structured like a sequence of logical steps, then that would at least
be a tit-for-tat exchange, but that rarely happens -- people who believe in forming their
arguments like rigorous proofs, usually also like to find the error in logical arguments
that lead to the opposite conclusion.)
To give you some of the flavor:
One chapter in The Big Questions
contains an elegant argument against protectionist tariffs: Suppose that
an American sells cameras for $80 but a foreigner wants to sell cameras in America for
$60 apiece. An American who would have bought the $80 camera will now buy the $60
camera and hence is better off by $20. The seller now has to sell their own cameras
for $60 to stay competitive, so they are worse off by at most $20 -- however,
if they voluntarily switch to some other business, then they'll be better off than
they were when they were selling cameras for $60, and therefore worse off by some
amount less than $20 from their original position. So on balance, abolishing
protectionist tariffs would be good for Americans.
"Therefore," writes Landsburg, "it seems to me that the protectionist's position
is even less respectable than
the creationist's. If you're convinced that most scientists are liars -- that everything they
say about fossils, for example, is false -- then you can be a logically consistent creationist.
But you can't be a logically consistent protectionist."
But the best part of reading an argument like that is to try and come up with a counter-argument
that is equally rigorous.
I think Landsburg is right, but only insofar as it applies to benefits to Americans.
That leaves out another part of the equation: whether the production
of cheaper foreign goods is harmful to foreigners providing the cheap labor. The textbook
answer from economic theory is that the factory jobs must make workers better off (or at least
no worse off) than they were before, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the jobs voluntarily.
On the other hand, conditions in overseas sweatshops are so notoriously dangerous and
unpleasant that it seems hard to believe the opportunities leave workers better off on balance.
So you could be a logically consistent protectionist if you believe that:
(a) sweatshop workers systematically underestimate how much the factory jobs are harming them;
and (b) the harm done to the workers outweighs the benefits of lower prices for Americans.
I'm not sure if these statements are true, but they are logically consistent. Still,
Landsburg's argument is about as concise as possible and seems to refute any argument that
protectionism makes
Americans better off on average.
In another chapter, Landsburg discusses the recent atheist bestsellers such as Richard Dawkins's
The God Delusion and suggests that these books are really directed against a non-existent
enemy, because the evidence is quite strong that most adults do not really believe the tenets
of any major religion anyway.
There is the argument that "interfaith dialog" makes no
sense if you really believe (as many major religions teach) that your own religion's tenets are
settled beyond discussion. There is the argument that since economic theory consistently
shows that people
respond to threat of punishment, virtually no one behaves as if they actually
believe in everlasting damnation after death as punishment for sin. And the
fact that the voluntary martyrdom of suicide
bombers is vastly more rare than most people believe, and a disproportionate number of those are
children (as Landsburg says, "I do not deny that
many children believe in God, just as I do not deny that many children believe in Santa
Claus"). I'd wondered before about how many people really did believe in God, but in just
a few pages this argument had me thinking that the number was a lot lower than I'd ever thought before.
On the other hand, there were some arguments that I didn't spend much time puzzling over at
all. Landsburg summarizes the paradox of "free will", and his
dismissal of the paradox, basically as follows: The interactions
of atoms that make up our brains and our environments, are deterministic processes, so if
you know the state of a system at a given point in time, you could predict the state at
any future point in time if you had enough computational power (with a caveat about the
randomness possibly introduced by quantum physics).
"Where, then, is there room for free will?...
Easy: There is room for free will on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as the
human being in question engages in deliberations that ultimately cause his actions."
He says that just as "weather" is shorthand for the aggregate of the interactions of
trillions of water molecules, "free will" is the same kind of shorthand:
"What caused your decision to get drunk and watch Mystery Science Theater the night before your philosophy final? Free will. An insane person might object that free will can't be it at all, because free will is just a shorthand term for an indescribably complex process involving trillions of neurons, which in turn can be described in terms of quadrillions of atoms and quintillions of subatomic particles. So what? You still have free will, and you know it."
I wrote Landsburg to object
that this misses what people really mean by "free will" -- it's not just
a shorthand term for the aggregate of particle interactions that make up human choices.
It means, very specifically, that you could possibly have done something other
than what you did. Landsburg replied to this objection by e-mail:
"I dispute that there is any way to make sense of a phrase like
'could possibly have done something else'. I know what it means
to say you did something; spacetime consists of all the things
that get done; it is what it is." And I agree; it's hard to pin down what
the statement means.
But it underlies all of our instincts and intuition about human choices and blame:
"You could have called yesterday, but you didn't." "I should have studied harder last
night."
If determinism is true, then these statements make no sense, and therein lies what I think
most people mean then they refer to the paradox of determinism vs. free will. I think the
issue deserves more thought than it's given in the book.
This is followed by a passage arguing that the controversy over "ESP" is silly, because
of course everyone knows certain things by "extra-sensory perception", if by that you mean "things
perceived not through the senses" -- like mathematical truths, which are arrived at through
thought and not sensory input.
Writes Landsburg:
"Some of those phenomena have one additional characteristic: They are
physically impossible. But if you're going to define ESP by its impossibility, then of course
there's no point in debating it...
And
if impossibility is not a criterion, then mathematical insight is as good an example of ESP --
in the everyday sense of the term -- as any instance of clairvoyance or telepathy."
Actually, I think the everyday use of the word "ESP" refers to perceiving
facts that do not logically have to be true (so mathematical facts are excluded) --
like "Someone is watching me right now" -- without sensory input. And, once you clarify the
definition, most people agree there's no evidence for it, so the whole discussion seems uninteresting.
But even if you throw out 75% of the book's arguments (which is far more than
I rejected), you should still enjoy puzzling through the remaining 25% and forming your own conclusions.
The most interesting argument in the book, to me, is about how to properly answer the
question: How much should the government be willing to spend, to save the life of one of it's
citizens? Of course if you're Ayn Rand, the answer is zero, but if you want to answer the
question according to the laws of economic efficiency, it's a tough one. Landsburg originally
got into the debate by writing a
column arguing that ventilator support was not
the most efficient way to help the poor. (Unfortunately, he couched it in the language of
"ventilator insurance", which I think clouded the issue. I think it would have been more clear
to say: "If we're going to spend this money to help the poor at all, it would make more sense
to spend it on groceries for a far larger number of people, than to spend it on ventilator
support for one person.") Another more liberal economist, Robert Frank, responded
with a New York Times
editorial arguing with
Landsburg's methods and coming up with his own reasoning. I think there are problems with
the reasoning on both sides (not logical errors, but rather situations in which the rules
that they have adopted, lead to paradoxes and untenable positions -- suggesting that both sides'
axioms have to be thrown out), but I still don't know the answer. (My own
opinion about the flaws in their logic, and an alternative answer, is at this link:
"How much
should government spend to save a single life?")
The Big Questions also has excursions into areas of science and mathematics that I had never fully
understood before, and in some cases hadn't even thought about. Landsburg describes how
he had first learned that colors could be arranged continuously into a color wheel, and later
learned that they could be arranged continuously along a line according to their wavelengths,
and then a friend pointed out the contradiction. Which is it? Do colors vary continuously
in two dimensions (forming a wheel) or one (forming a line)? Or, wait a minute, we measure
colors according to the strength of their red, green, and blue components, so don't they
vary continuously in three dimensions? Well, the answer is in there.
There are also chapters on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Gödel's incompleteness
theorem, and the quantum phenomenon of
"spooky action at a distance",
which explain all of the concepts more clearly than I'd ever heard them explained anywhere
else. I think that most writers attempting to explain these concepts err either on the side
of being too precise -- determined that everything they right be correct, with no
regard for whether they reader grasps it or not -- or too vague -- giving the general air
of mystery, but not explaining the rules governing how a phenomenon works, and how to work
with those rules to derive other conclusions from them. Landsburg's chapter simply
begins,
"This chapter is full of lies. That's because I'll be explaining the foundations of quantum
mechanics, and I assume that if you wanted a careful accounting of every detail, you'd be
reading a textbook." The text then gives an example of considering an electron that
moves in a conceptual "circle", where at some points on the circle it has a greater
probability of manifesting itself in one location if you examine it,
and at other points it has a greater
probability of manifesting itself in another location. He uses this to dispel a common
misconception about the uncertainty principle:
You're just idly wondering where the electron is. In most circumstances, quantum mechanics says that it's quite impossible for you to know the answer to that question.
Aha! A fundamental limitation on human knowledge, no? No. Here's why: Most of the time, the electron is nowhere. Asking "Where is the electron?" is akin to asking "What is the electron's favorite movie?". It's a nonsense question. The inability to answer nonsense questions is not a fundamental limitation on knowledge.
How can the electron be nowhere? Because electrons behave nothing at all like anything you're familiar with. Instead of a location, the electron has a quantum state.
This clarified something for me that had bugged me for years.
I never took a course in quantum physics, but I had indeed always assumed that
electrons did have a "location" and the uncertainty principle referred to a limit on our ability
to determine that location.
Unfortunately there are probably many people who get through an
entire course in quantum physics without getting this cleared up.
Balanced against these valuable insights are some libertarian arguments that are probably nothing you
haven't heard before, especially if you have read of one of Landsburg's earlier books,
Fair Play -- subtitled "What your child can teach you about economics, values,
and the meaning of life", although the book was clearly about what he was teaching to
his daughter.
Many reviewers of Fair Play took note of
passages like this one:
Most people have instinctive sympathy for the man who says "I tried for months to get a job and nobody would hire me. Only in desperation did I turn to theft." The same people have only scorn for the man who says "I tried for months to get a date and nobody would go out with me. Only in desperation did I turn to rape."
While I think most rape victims would have some choice words about the comparison,
I was more unpersuaded because the passage wasn't structured like a
true argument.
In a good argument -- like Landsburg's earlier argument against protectionist tariffs --
-- you start with premises that seem apparently true, proceed
by steps that seem apparently valid, and end with a conclusion that may not have been
obvious from the outset. But in this case, the premise is the argument --
either you think rape and theft are comparable, or you don't. I don't think they are,
because (a) the harm to a rape victim is out of proportion to the "benefit" to the rapist,
and (b) notwithstanding the claims of college males, you won't actually die without sex.
(Just as a thought experiment, if you would die without sex, and a man hadn't
been able to get any women to sleep with him, and the government didn't provide any sort
of sex "safety net", more people probably would feel sympathy for the rapist, if he only
did it to save his own life.)
Some passages in The Big Questions are recycled from Fair Play
and require a (just) slightly more thoughtful rebuttal. Landsburg argues that most
parents, deep down, must not believe in redistributive taxation because
"I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do. Nor have I ever heard a parent tell a child that if one kid has more toys than the others, then it's okay for those others to form a 'government' and vote to take those toys away."
OK, but... I have also never
heard a parent tell their child that it was OK to build a "jail" and put other kids in that
"jail" for wrongdoing. And yet almost everyone, even libertarians, supports some form of
imprisonment for lawbreakers. The lesson here is that there are some powers that are appropriate
to delegate to a democratically elected government, with all the right checks and balances, but
that you don't want random vigilantes seizing for themselves. So if you want a principled
argument against taxation, it would take more than that.
And other passages in Fair Play deservedly did not make the cut of being imported
into The Big Questions:
The massacre at Waco took place only days after my daughter (then aged six) had asked me how the government uses our tax dollars. When she walked in on the television coverage of flamed and carnage, I told her that now she was seeing the answer to her question. And when she heard that there were children in there, that they were burning children, her eyes grew wide with horror, and I both hope and believe that she will never forget that moment.
If you want 230 pages of that, then Fair Play is the book for you!
Of the libertarian arguments that did get carried over into The Big Questions,
I think the problem with most of them is not that I think the conclusion is wrong, but, again,
that the whole argument is the premise, and if you disagree with the premise then there's
nothing to think about. For example:
Bert wants to hire an office manager and Ernie wants to manage an office. The law allows Ernie to refuse any job for any reason. If he doesn't like Albanians, he doesn't have to work for one. Bert is held to a higher standard: If he lets it be known that no Albanians need apply, he'd better have a damned good lawyer.
These asymmetries grate against the most fundamental requirement of fairness -- that people should be treated equally, in the sense that their rights and responsibilities should not change because of irrelevant external circumstances.
But I think the laws do treat all people equally, because they apply equally whether Bert is
discriminating in deciding whether to hire Ernie, or whether Ernie is discriminating in
deciding whether to hire Bert. The laws don't apply equally to all roles that people
play, which is the distinction that Landsburg is highlighting -- but laws never apply
equally to different roles, since roles are defined by what we do, and what is the point of
laws, except to draw distinctions based on behaviors? So there may be some other argument
against anti-discrimination laws, but "symmetry" by itself wouldn't be enough.
A footnote in this chapter of The Big Questions says,
"Portions of this chapter are adapted from my earlier book Fair Play." In the margin
where I'd been scribbling all of my notes and equations and counterarguments, I wrote, "That's what's
wrong with it!"
And yet, as I said, I would probably have paid up to about $200 for the book, based on
how much I enjoyed the parts that I did like. At one point Landsburg praises
an insight from Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter and adds, "You should read all their books."
Yes, and all of Richard Dawkins's and
Malcolm Gladwell's and Steven Pinker's and Dubner's and Levitt's books, for starters.
Landsburg himself would probably agree that it's more important to read those books,
than this one. But there's time in your life to read The Big Questions as well.
It's even structured so you can consume it in bite-sized portions while taking a break
from working your way through those other books -- which are, in truth, more valuable,
but not as much fun.
You can purchase The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
What caused your decision to get drunk and watch Mystery Science Theater the night before your philosophy final?
My god, it's like looking into a mirror.
Free will.
Oddly enough when I responded to the last question on the final by drawing parallels between getting drunk and watching MST3K with Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom , my professor assured me that it was sloven stupidity--not free will--and graded me accordingly.
My work here is dung.
The answer to everything. The rest are nothing but details.
How is babby formed????? how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent? Yahoo Answers
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Precisely because the big questions will never be answered by mathematics, economics and physics, but in the minds of mad apes trapped in a pointless existence.
As I get older, I still find myself an atheist, but I now longer feel logic and reason and math will ever prove God doesn't exist, and I no longer expect everyone to agree with me.
Landsburg replied to this objection by e-mail: "I dispute that there is any way to make sense of a phrase like 'could possibly have done something else'. I know what it means to say you did something; spacetime consists of all the things that get done; it is what it is."
Wow, he dismisses a major issue in the free will debate offhand. That tells me all I need to know about him.
Well, that, plus this post on his blog:
In fact, the most complex thing I'm aware of is the system of natural numbers (0,1,2,3, and all the rest of them) together with the laws of arithmetic. That system did not emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings.
If you doubt the complexity of the natural numbers, take note that you can use just a small part of them to encode the entire human genome. That makes the natural numbers more complex than human life.
Um, no. Just ... just, no.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Translation: I don't like some of the things science is saying, so I'll give greater weight to my prejudices.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
the guy who played Dietrich in Barney Miller finally put his years of thought-provoking comments in a book. I can't wait to read it.
I have never seen an economist or "libertarian" give a convincing argument against protectionist tariffs.
however, if they voluntarily switch to some other business
Every argument always hinges on some inane assumption like a free market for labor or ignores production and instead focuses on individuals trading finished goods or promotes sacrificing long term gains for short term profit or assumes that new and better industries and business opportunities will always spring up or ignores the reality that the reason tariffs exist is to protect a nation's industry against the predatory practices of potentially hostile nation-states.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It's a "big" question to ask why there are atheistic best sellers?
most adults do not really believe the tenets of any major religion anyway.
Of course not. The question is, do most adults believe some of the tenets?
There is the argument that "interfaith dialog" makes no sense if you really believe (as many major religions teach) that your own religion's tenets are settled beyond discussion.
Ah yes. The "you have to have an open mind" argument. I guess evolution, global warming, and government health care debates, on the other hand, really ARE settled beyond discussion. [/sarcasm]. Seriously though - I know many major religions are of the gnostic type... hvae to have higher knowledge, enlightened, etc. But what exactly does "beyond discussion" mean? Not doubting/convinced? It seems that not-being-in-doubt and being-convinced are feelings reserved for atheists, now. Only someone dogmatically believing in the non-existence of an entity are allowed to be sure of their belief. Which is odd, since most logicians will tell you that it is much harder to prove non-existence than it is to prove existence. I wonder why Landsburg didn't mention that? Seems like that is a "big question" - why are many logicians and scientists atheists, since they are so careful not to deny existence of other things that we don't even have evidence for; they simply understand that denying existence is a big logical step in that you have to disprove every possible existence first. When it comes to the supernatural/God though, they are quite willing to believe in a non-existence and not be open to discussion. Why does Landsburg only pick on those who are convinced, perhaps illogically, that God does exist?
Incidentally, you can be illogically convinced to believe an correct thing, and you can be logically convinced to believe an incorrect thing. Logic is an argument; what you logically deduce or induce from makes a big difference, as your premise may be wrong, thus your conclusion could be wrong as well.
virtually no one behaves as if they actually believe in everlasting damnation after death as punishment for sin.
Most people don't behave like there is death at all. Most people don't want to talk about death, don't want to hear about death, and don't even want to think about death. Many people "defy" death and live like they won't die. I guess that means death doesn't actually exist! Cool!
I'd wondered before about how many people really did believe in God, but in just a few pages this argument had me thinking that the number was a lot lower than I'd ever thought before.
So without seeing any numbers and going entirely on the basis of logical deductions from unproved and perhaps disputed premises, you are coming to new conclusions on what people actually believe - without asking them.
Wow... I didn't know Rush Limbaugh read slashdot!
Could take till the end of universe and a godlike intelligence to answer how to decrease entropy, or even an entire planet to figure to what question is 42 the answer.
What matters as big questions now could not matter in the future, or the proper answer be meaningless for our current knowledge/posibilities.
so I'll give greater weight to my prejudices.
You say that as if scientists don't have prejudices/presuppositions/premises. I've never met a human that didn't.
however these days when scientists can subvert the free market and undermine sound public policy simply by publishing false papers in journals,
As a scientist, there is undeniable evidence for recent climate change and "global warming". Just look at the fact that the earth was virtually covered in ice as little as 150,000 years ago, and you'll see a trend.
I think what you're referring to is "MAN MADE" global warming. Not ALL the scientific community agree with that hypothesis because it fails to account for the shrinking martian polar caps or the increased atmospheric phenomena in Jupiter's atmosphere, for example - phenomena which are clearly not man made and yet happen to be occurring at the same time as our planet is heating up. Some people explain it away as co-incidence, talking about wobbles in Mars' revolution, etc. Anyway I'm not out to "convince" anyone of anything - that's not what science is about.
What I do want is to defend those of us that refuse to be lumped into the POLITICAL outcry about "man made" climate change which, surprise surprise, occurs at the same time as governments are enforcing a new way of taxation: taxation on "greenhouse gases". WOW. What a co-incidence. Surely there's no "political" motive behind blaming polluters for climate change? The backlash is eventually going to happen, however, when all those measures and steps fail to change global warming one bit. I wonder what the answer will be from the politicians THEN. Probably more taxes.
Climate change, however, IS a fact. Our poles ARE receding, and our AVERAGE temperatures are increasing. If you deny this I suggest a little more research.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Anyone else have a hard time following this reviewer? A little context for the many objections would be helpful.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
in life, the world, the universe. In everything actually...
but we already know the answer is always 42.
Always.
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
You forgot: "Science is bad because scientists are subject to capitalism and a tiny minority of scientists use dubious tactics to gain funding for their projects." Also, what about your gut instincts contradicts the idea that pumping millions of tons of gases into the atmosphere has zero affect on climate? I'd rather trust science to investigate how significant this effect is, rather than trust my gut and immediately stop driving my car.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
I never said that, but the whole point of the scientific method is to weed out said prejudices.
Besides, the parent goes much beyond that and basically accuses the large majority of researchers in an area of research of knowingly publishing false information. That goes beyond "they're prejudiced" and basically calls them crooks. I'd challenge the parent to actually produce any such evidence. It's one thing to say "I don't agree with said theory" and quite another to say "they're liars".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Climate change, however, IS a fact. Our poles ARE receding, and our AVERAGE temperatures are increasing. If you deny this I suggest a little more research.
Yes, the climate is always changing, is it not? That seems like a very reasonable asumption. There is certainly evidence of various cooling and warming in the geographic past, which kinda implies that it wasn't man making those climate changes.
Thank you, however, for your comments about the political outcry. In defense of the OP, "global warming" in non-scientific communities seems to typically apply to the idea of man-made global warming.... otherwise, Al Gore (great scientist that he is ;) hehe) wouldn't refer to his agenda as simply "global warming." The news uses "global warming" to refer to the man-made stuff, etc.
I'm glad there are at least a few scientists willing to be upset about the political agendas :)
There is no probability at any time for the electron to be nowhere, at least not in ordinary (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics. So that explanation sounds wrong.
The uncertainty principle for position and momentum is quite precisely like what's involved in the question of exactly when you hear a trumpet sound the note 'G'. A particular tone like G means a particular frequency of sound, and frequency only makes sense if you can speak of at least some decent fraction of one full cycle of oscillation. So, by definition, a pure tone is not something that can occur at a single instant. To the extent that you hear a short 'ping' of sound at a definite moment, that ping has to include lots of overtones, and thus not have a single definite pitch. To the extent that you hear a pure tone, the sound has to last many periods, and thus not happen at a single given instant. Quantum mechanics says that position and momentum are to each other as time and tone.
If you were really keen on determining exactly when a trumpet sounded, you could combine a microphone and amplifier and a sensitive switch, and set it to trigger at the instant a particular sound intensity was reached. But if you also wanted to discriminate between a trumpet sounding G, and a steeldrum hitting D, then you'd NEED to give your detector some minimum sampling time, to recognize the tone. And this would lower the precision of your time measurement. So in just this similar way, you can in principle choose to measure a particle's position precisely, and your apparatus will find every particle at some position within some narrow precision width; but this will by definition imply accepting less precision in determining their momentum. Or you could trade off the other way, and get precise momentum by sampling over longer distances.
That is pretty much exactly what the quantum mechanical uncertainty relation is about. This doesn't explain how it can possibly be that these wave phenomenon issues can be relevant to a particle like an electron; that part is the basic strangeness of quantum mechanics. But quantum uncertainty is precisely like time-tone uncertainty, so if you can accept the whole wave thing, the uncertainty deal is easy from there.
Sometimes being wrong in interesting ways about interesting things is quite good for starting discussions.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
"global warming," as it is commonly used in the media, does not refer to naturally caused climate changes. There's plenty of "global warming" propaganda to point to... or at least, the conclusions of "why" to point to (such as the Inconvenient Truth "documentary")
As for the scientific method, as I recall, that includes a lot of experimentation and repetition of experimentation, right? One thing I have never been able to figure out is how you can repeat experiments on origins (of matter, of forces, etc). Yes, directly referring to hypotheses such as the "big bang." It seems, if anything, that should be history, right?
Same with climate change, to some extent. Causation of climate change has not been scientifically tested without prejudices. I have never seen a study where they took a non-climate-changing atmosphere exactly like ours (which we don't even understand yet, since people don't seem to get that climate change occurs naturally, too) and put a few SUVs in it to test whether or not human CO2 emissions were able to affect the atmosphere...
OT: slashdot doesn't appear to accept subscript tags. sad!
2. They also assume the question. If you believe in a soul, then the brain could be considered determenisitically created reception device for the soul's commands. Then everything about the brain could be determenstic, in the same way a radio is 100% predicatable, but the descisions, being made off-site in the soul, not the brain, are totally not determenistic.
3. The heart of the problem is a definition power play. Yes, if you define the brain ahead of the time as a determenistic construct, then since determenistic constructs do not allow for free-will, then humans get no soul.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
so I'll give greater weight to my prejudices.
You say that as if scientists don't have prejudices/presuppositions/premises. I've never met a human that didn't.
Huh? How do you arrive at that conclusion? He assumed no such thing. Of course scientists have prejudices/presuppositions/premises. Science is a tool for arriving at useful conclusions despite that fact. Science works despite the individual prejudices of any of it's practitioners. Gut instincts do not reliably arrive at useful conclusions. In science, the more ingrained the prejudices, the more prestige that comes from destroying them. Adding a bit to human knowledge won't get you in the history books. Creating a scientific revolution will.
The important thing to remember is that science is not a religion, and blindly believing in it won't get a scientist any respect. There is no dogma of science that all scientists are required to believe in. As a scientist, you get more out of overturning the status quo than supporting it. Any scientist who had clear, incontrovertible proof that global warming was false would go down in the history books, even his most vehement foes forced by the facts to admit that he was right. Scientific revolutions have happened many times before, and will continue to happen.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah, because that worked so well for Heisenberg...
You clearly do not understand how science works. Vulcanologists don't build volcanoes, zoologists don't build zebras or cows, cosmologists can't make black holes.
You have a strawman understanding of the way science works. Worse, you simply throw accusations around without proof, based simply on your prejudices and your dislike of the answers you get.
But rest assurred, science is not entirely about experiments. Experiments are one way to gain data and test hypotheses. They are not the only way. What I do recommend you do is sue your high school science teacher, who so badly misinformed you.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do.
Really? I have. They go to the parent and say, "That child has all of the toys and it's not fair." Frequently, the parent will agree, and if it's a child they have some control over (such as a sibling, or if the parent is babysitting) they will redistribute the toys.
They may couch it as a suggestion to "share", but they're not really planning on respecting the child's preference not to share. They will use force to overcome whatever "right" the child may have to those toys, regardless of whether the child has "earned" them. Because a parent's force is overwhelming compared to the child's, the use of force comes without violence much of the time. But it's force nonetheless, and it's the child ultimately exerting it, through the parents.
I think there are at least two arguments that show that free will is not a trivial matter of definition as Landsburg apparently claims.
(1) Psychologists and neurologists have shown that people's explanations for their own actions can be wrong. E.g., you can have situations (with split-brain patients, for example) where they perform some voluntary action that they don't know the reasons for, and when you ask them why they did it, they give a made-up explanation that they themselves believe. To me, this suggests that it may be useful to consider free will as a psychological sensation similar to color or musical pitch, in which case it's a nontrivial phenomenon with a scientific explanation -- not a "yes/no" question that is a trivial matter of definition.
(2) Another argument is that the structure of Einstein's theory of general relativity is such that you have perfectly valid solutions to the field equations in which there are closed timelike curves (CTCs). A CTC means that you can have events A, B, and C, where A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. We don't know if there are any realistic conditions in our universe under which they would exist (hence the chronology protection conjecture), but they're not logically or mathematically impossible. If a human being passes around such a CTC, you can get all kinds of paradoxes, e.g., older-me warns younger-me to avoid going around the CTC. Here is a nice summary of this kind of stuff: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/ . Basically you have a situation where there is a physics question (are CTCs possible, and if so, how would they work?), where one of the strongest arguments available is based on the assumption of free will (the feeling that older-me can *choose* freely to warn younger-me away from the CTC). Again, there is no clearcut, trivial answer; free will comes up as one aspect of a more general, unsolved problem of how causality works. Some physical calculations suggest that there is nothing paradoxical about CTCs; see the stuff about the billiard balls in the link above.
Find free books.
... considered a seperate "branch of knowledge" since if you study people like plato, Plato says thus:
"And those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers."
(Plato, Republic, 380BC)
I think many ancient philosophers would find it strange we consider things seperate, in the last little while we've tended not to see things holistically like ancient philosophers did.
You may well be right about quantum effects, but you completely ignore the tremendous amounts of input a human mind can process. Ask a person who they will vote for, then come back a week later and ask them again. If their answer is different, have you proven that their mind is non-deterministic? Of course not. To show that you would need to back up time, and see if they always answer the same way the first time.
Intuition would seem to suggest that they would, as can be seen in almost any depiction of time travel. Joe climbs in his time machine and goes back in time for an hour, and sees himself doing exactly the same thing he did an hour ago. A lot of books deal with the effects the time traveler might have on his own past, but I can't think of an instance where an author believed the character would arbitrarily decide to behave differently the second time around.
You clearly do not understand how science works. Vulcanologists don't build volcanoes, zoologists don't build zebras or cows, cosmologists can't make black holes.
You give three examples of processes/phenomena that currently exist and are observable to counter an example of a non-current, non-observable process/phenomena like origins?
Yes, experimentation is a way to gain data and test hypotheses. While I know there are other ways to gain data - such as observation - and by the way, when was the last time you observed the origin of matter? - I would indeed have to be educated as to other ways to test a hypothesis. I can't think of a way to test something without experimenting. It's practically the same word in most people's vocabularies :)
As for suing my high school teacher... while we're at it, I should sue wikipedia, which must also be prejudiced against science, I guess...
A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.[2]
...and also the Merriam Webster dictionary...
principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses
(I would, especially in a dictionary, not interpret "and" to mean "or")
He wants to prove that everything is essentially deterministic (waving his hands a bit, possibly justifiably, at the QM stuff), and claims that free will is a sort of emergent property. And does that by assuming that everything is deterministic. Um, ok.
I haven't read the book, but from the summary it seems as if it's part of a genre of books popular in recent years, in which experts in some field try to apply what they know to some other field that they don't know anything about... with sort of dubious results. The original Freakonomics, and even more so Superfreakonomics was like this. SF, in particularly, was done with a certain intellectual dishonesty, mischaracterizing the views of some of the climate scientists quoted in the climate change section, and using some fairly dubious assumptions in the section about whether to walk or drive after you've had a few too many. There was another book recently in the same vein - unfortunately, I can remember neither the author nor the title, so I can't link to it - but it was a statistician who tried to analyze climate data. He came to the conclusion that "global warming" was bunk - and was promptly (intellectually speaking) torn limb-from-limb by actual climate scientists. It turns out that blindly apply statistics to a problem you don't really understand is not necessarily the path to enlightenment.
Something to keep in mind when reading this sort of thing: books that study a problem and conclude that the intuitively obvious answer/conventional wisdom is correct... don't sell. If you want to move your book, it needs to be controversial, so there's a built-in incentive to say incendiary stuff. This particular book sounds interesting enough that I might check it out of the library, but I doubt I'd spend any money on it.
Not everything has to be tested on the largest possible scale.
You don't need to poison a whole river to conclude that mercury is bad for fish. You can poison a small aquarium in an experimental setting, calculate the LD50, and from there calculate how much mercury will it take to kill half the fish in a given river.
Of course, the results in a real river won't be as neat as in an aquarium. It'll turn out that currents result in an uneven concentration, maybe it'll accumulate unevenly with depth and perhaps some things in the river will absorb large amounts of it lowering the overall concentration. But that still doesn't mean mercury doesn't have an effect on fish.
Same way, the effect of CO2 is known and well tested, the volume and composition of the atmosphere is also known, the main energy input into the system (the Sun) is also known, and where that energy goes after that is also known. Figuring out that with the same input, making it harder for energy to leave the planet will make things hotter isn't rocket science.
Now of course the atmosphere is big and complicated, there exist sinks and sources in various places, so changes don't necessarily have immediate or linear results. But still, in the end, there's an input and an output. If you reduce the output, stuff HAS to accumulate somewhere.
"Do colors vary continuously in two dimensions (forming a wheel) or one (forming a line)? Or, wait a minute, we measure colors according to the strength of their red, green, and blue components, so don't they vary continuously in three dimensions? Well, the answer is in there. "
There is a 1-to-1 correspondence between [0,1], R, R^2 and R^3 (R^n), so doesn't really matter which way you want to place the colours. It just happens that we can draw 1 and 2 on a piece of paper.
You test a claim through observation. Experimentation is one way to gain new data, but it is not the only one, and for some phenomena it is quite impossible to experiment directly any ways. One cannot hope to put the Earth's climate in a test tube, so one instead makes models that create predictions and then you go out and see if the predicted observations are there.
Why would you think that experimentation is the requirement of science? I've pointed out the illogical nature of such a claim, but you persist. Worse, you use a dictionary and a clearly flawed grammatical reading of a Wikipedia article to try to bolster your point of view. I don't think you're a moron, so I can only assume you're intentionally trying to win an argument through a combination of fallacies (strawman, appeal to authority - kind of ironic).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ok, I haven't read the book. But the protectionism stuff laid out in the summary is yet another dumb argument - it doesn't account for a number of things: 1) people aren't perfectly free to switch from line of business to another at the drop of a hat, 2) changing businesses is risky, and people like to avoid risk, so much so that they'll pay for it, but his accounting doesn't include the cost of this risk. 3) etc, etc.
Without having read the book it's hard to say for sure, but from the examples cited it seems pretty obvious that the author just wrote down his libertarian principles and then arranged his logic to support them, which makes the whole thing hard to take seriously.
Only someone dogmatically believing in the non-existence of an entity are allowed to be sure of their belief.
The non existence of god is absolutely not dogmatic among atheists. Atheists do not claim that there is no god... the simply are not making a claim that there is a god. If someone provides sufficient evidence, any honest atheist will change their mind. It is belief in the absence of evidence that makes religious thinking dogmatic.
There is a kind of person out there who is absolutely sure, with no evidence whatever, that basic numerical logic can be applied to complex human phenomena such as government, philosophy, and peace of mind with great success. I suspect that they are probably correct, if your measure of "great success" is also measured purely by basic numerical logic, i.e. a few additional points of efficiency that amounts to pennies in the pockets of people who could have done without them. And what they get in return is the satisfaction of knowing that they have total and complete control over those few pennies, which will never be delivered into the hands of bureaucracies which are inherently evil for some reason. Good for them. I'm sure Libertopia will one day be a grand place full of happy people who are overjoyed by the glib and peremptory assholes who would control debate, but I dare anyone to determine how the end result is markedly different from a society utterly ruled by any other kind of fervent belief - see the delightful anecdote about what kind of things Haselton teaches his six-year-old daughter, as if there was nothing more to it than "government takes your money and kills children. Sweet dreams honey." I don't know how you're doing worse than this if you're sending your kids off to Jesus Camp. It's a kind of unquestioning faith in the unproven for which most churches would kill...and have.
Interconnectedness is a basic fact of life. There are human forces much stronger than the kind of processes you learn in undergrad logic classes. Some gracefully accept it. Some never grow beyond fighting it. If you are of the very solid and hardly movable opinion that what really matters in life, what's really going to change the world, is precisely how you argue points of logic and how you pick apart someone else's, you're decidedly in the latter category, in which case there's a lot less of philosophy there than there is pathology. It's for that reason that I look forward to my down-modding with equanimity.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
This book and its likes are all pointless.
The ultimate question has been answered already.
The answer is
42
so I'll give greater weight to my prejudices.
You say that as if scientists don't have prejudices/presuppositions/premises. I've never met a human that didn't.
All people make assumptions. Smart people are willing to give those up.
I am the lawn!
From my own far-too-long-and-obsessive meditation on time travel:
A lot of people don't like this model because it would seem to eliminate any possibility of free will. Personally, I don't particularly worry about whether I have free will or not. If I do have free will, then I don't have to worry about it. If I don't, then there's no point in worrying about it. Either way...
But this model doesn't necessarily pose problems for free will. Consider normal ideas about time and free will. Your parents freely chose to have you, right? At the very least, their free choices led them to the point where they did have you, though hopefully they were happy about it.
Now, assuming no time travel, those choices cannot now be changed, right? They cannot now decide not to have had you. The moment of choice was back then, somewhere in the past. Once that choice was made, it was fixed. Assuming free will, it was not totally determined by what led up to it in some physical deterministic sense, but once made it could not be changed. This is not a constraint on free will.
Now, just by adding in time travel we needn't change anything about this. Choices are freely made at the moment they are decided. It's just that now it's possible to know what those free choices "were" at a point in time "before" the choice "will be" made. (English again forces us to use strange tenses to speak about this. Oh, well.) Remember, in this model, there is no privileged point we can pick out and call 'the present'. Every moment is past to some instants, future to others. Every moment is a "present".
(Note that some people use this idea to reconcile the idea of God knowing what we will do with the notion of free will. God, existing outside of time, doesn't ordain what people do, It just sees them doing it. I only bring it up to point out that lots of people have no problem in principle with the idea that they both have free will and yet someone knows with certainty what they will do. I don't see why it's any different if someone besides a God has that knowledge...)
If you see a movie of yourself from the future doing certain things tomorrow, from a certain perspective it doesn't mean that you are "fated" to do those things. It just means that you know, when that time comes around, that doing those things will seem to you to be the best available choice.
Perhaps the future choice seems silly, or even terrible. Well, can't you think of a moment where you've made a choice, and then later (perhaps only a second later) thought, "What was I thinking?" The fact that it seems unlikely to you that you will make that choice doesn't mean that you won't make it. People do things they never expected to do, even said they wouldn't do, all the time.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Very kind of you. I bet people aren't grateful either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You have the answer. You pretty much said it.
Scientists make a living by proving things. The entire scientific method is based on the fact that the natural world has order and that natural phenomenon can be reproduced nilly-willy.
They won't believe something they can't prove or something anybody can't prove, at least in an experiment. An absurd philosophy to hold.
The problem I see with the anti-protectionism argument is that the models used are too simple: They try to maximize total GDP over the longer run. While that's certainly a laudable goal, it should not be the only factor. As an analogy, if you want to maximize return on investments over the longer run, then start-up stocks and derivatives would be the way to go. On paper, that's what would give you the maximum total return on average.
But "on average" is the key here. Risk is not "free" in economics and investment theory. For investments, you weigh risk against return to find the level that best fits your needs. You mix high-risk and low-risk investments to balance the pay/risk level. For sound investments one usually ends up selecting some bonds even though they have a lower average return rate. This is because they are a hedge against market meltdown. Risk is lowered at the expense of average return.
The same applies to trade: "free trade" is the more-leveraged position, meaning you take on more risk in order to gain a better average return. This risk manifests itself in various ways, including economic bubbles and the need for individuals to change careers every 20 years or so as their present career becomes a commodity and goes over-seas where labor is cheaper. It's hard to raise a family if you have to start over every 20 years or so. Stability is worth something to people, and leveraged trade hinders that.
Full free trade is only a free lunch if you ignore factors that are harder to compute. Economists often call these "externalities", which is kind of dismissive. It's the messy "side-effects" little dumping area for things that are difficult to quantify and model.
I'm for balanced trade, but this lopsided trade has to go. The recent financial meltdown is in part caused by Asia using excess dollars from lopsided trade to loan to the US, creating the Great Loan Bubble.
Further is loss of economic diversification. Without local manufacturing, we risk being caught with no factories if there's ever a trade-disrupting war or natural disaster. Ireland encountered a diversification problem when they switched a majority of their farms to potatoes. Potatoes grew very well in that country, becoming the most competitive food item for them to grow. However, a potato disease wiped out most of the potato crop one year, creating death and panic. Diversification is yet another hedge against risk, and has value to human beings. For a similar reason, we shouldn't let manufacturing just slip away. Some economists choose to ignore the value of diversification, either out of bias, laziness (hard to calc), or naivety.
Here's a tale of overly-focusing on one factor: In Soviet Russia there is a story of a shoe factory that was pressured to increase production, as measured by quantity of shoes produced. However, the factory was a bit short on materials. So to increase production, the factory decided to produce more children's shoes, which require less material. Eventually there was a severe shortage of adult shoes, especially larger sizes. However, the factory was meeting its production goals on paper.
The simplicity of a metric or model is not necessarily related to its importance.
Table-ized A.I.
Markets are systems. Systems, if you care if they exist or not, must be regulated. The free market you're talking about is like supernova. Yes, eventually there will be some sort of equilibrium, but it's useless to everything it destroyed in order to reach that state. If you want to build a bomb, you don't throw random volatile elements into a mason jar and shake it up, unless you have a death wish.
Let me give you an example. You probably know Adam Smith's name. Due to your simplistic interpretation of "free" markets, I doubt you have any idea of what he wrote. He stated that a 5% cap on interest rates was necessary to force investment in "real" profits, not just interest profits, or else all capital would flood into financial sectors and destabilize the market. No one is going to build a car factory if they can make the same money by moving their money around.
Unless you are willing to watch sick people die outside of hospitals or shoot people in the head who cost society more to keep alive than to kill, you aren't going to have a libertarian market. It's not in our nature. A hundred years ago there were even discussions about whether making money without working, or working very little, should be considered moral. Imagine that.
All of the things those scaaaarrrry governments provide is called regulation. Regulation leads to standards. Standards are what allow infrastructure, market competitiveness, and a little thing I like to call civilization.
Again, ideals are just that. Goal posts for reality. Communist China is on your left. Somalia is on your right (no government to "ruin" their markets). I'd rather be leaning to the left if I can't shoot straight down the middle.
I read his "More Sex is Safer Sex" and spent about half of it muttering "but you're ignoring a relevant factor...".
I see that the reviews at the Amazon page for that book:
http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-Safer-Unconventional-Economics/dp/1416532226/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2 ...agree with my assessment. Give the first couple a quick skim before buying this one. Many of his arguments read like he started off with the intention of writing somethingn entertainingly contrarian and counter-intuitive, then assembled an argument to defend it. And, of course, a book author has the advantage of only taking on arguments that he himself allows in the book, gets to decide which factors of the problem are relevant, and so on.
I did pass the test the reviewer offers here: I had specific points at which I disagreed with his argument. But I didn't find that fun; it's no fun halting all agreement with an argument at step 4 and having to go on and read steps 5-9 while holding a little asterisk in your head that says "none of this matters because 4 is clearly wrong".
As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for. Recommending that certain prudent people have more sex, while assuming that the amount of total sex in the world will remain a constant, is not, to my mind, a safe assumption. But it wasn't slashdot; all I could do was sit there, frustrated at my inability to argue with the book.
So I'll give this one a miss. Thanks anyway.
I appreciate the non-moron status, hehe.
You test a claim through observation.
So.. you can test a claim as well as gather data to support or "start" a claim(/hypothesis) through either observation or experimentation. Right?
So, if you cannot observe nor experiment on something directly, it's all just data that needs to be interpreted, pretty much... and doesn't seem to fall to clearly into the realm of science.
For global warming specifically - I agree, you can't put the earth's climate in a test tube. It takes quite a bit of computational power just to try to put the meteorological system in a "test tube," heh. I don't recall ever really seeing any model that had correct predictions for global warming (man-made). Most of the predictions I am hearing about - in the media, obviously - are doomsday type predictions which obviously have not occurred.
Why would you think that experimentation is the requirement of science?
Not the. Just a. When I took science classes, there was one word that was mentioned quite a bit when it came to learning about the scientific method: repeatability.
I also heard a lot about controlled environments, changing one parameter, etc. They even talked about those things in macro-economics, which isn't exactly a hard science...
Re: "Risk is not free" - Should be "stability and predictability are not free". In other words, stability and predictability of investment or strategy is a desirable trait by most accounts.
Table-ized A.I.
That argument assumes there is unlimited demand for everything, and than more jobs will be created and there will be not welfare costs from lost jobs. But, the best things in life are free or cheap. It probably assumes some other things too.
See:
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Because he forgets a bazillion things that matter. It's almost like this book is really more about how to lock in some ideas by surrounding them with logical sounding puffery, rather than any of the rules that it says.
I mean, "I consider the protectionist to be worse than a creationist", seems to me a loaded statement. A political writer like me should have no problem saying that free traders should all be tortured to death and executed, but a professor? I think not.
This is my sig.
"How many roads must a man walk down?"
"Honey, does this skirt make me look fat?"
(NO, the answer is - and always will be - NO!)
To give you some of the flavor: One chapter in The Big Questions contains an elegant argument against protectionist tariffs: Suppose that an American sells cameras for $80 but a foreigner wants to sell cameras in America for $60 apiece. An American who would have bought the $80 camera will now buy the $60 camera and hence is better off by $20. The seller now has to sell their own cameras for $60 to stay competitive, so they are worse off by at most $20 -- however, if they voluntarily switch to some other business, then they'll be better off than they were when they were selling cameras for $60, and therefore worse off by some amount less than $20 from their original position. So on balance, abolishing protectionist tariffs would be good for Americans. "Therefore," writes Landsburg, "it seems to me that the protectionist's position is even less respectable than the creationist's. If you're convinced that most scientists are liars -- that everything they say about fossils, for example, is false -- then you can be a logically consistent creationist. But you can't be a logically consistent protectionist."
Why would I sell a camera for $60 when I can sell is for $80?
The only reason is so that I can put the guy who has to sell his camera for $80 out of business then I can sell my camera for $100. Then when someone else wants to get into the camera industry, and can issue them an ultimatum, you can sell your camera at $100 and we can both make outragous profits, or I can sell my camera at $60 or even less because I'm already making a profit at $60 and perhaps put you out of business. People who are interested in maximizing their profit are usually going to take the offer to sell their widget at the higher price. And maybe they will both agree to sell their cameras at $120 unit and make even more money. So in the end the consumer loses.
Libertarianism leads to the formation of Trusts and an unfree market.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Belief in free will is belief in a soul which is capable of making decisions that the brain presents before it using some non-physical and unpredictable process. It's not necessary to believe that the soul survives death. I consider free will to be a ridiculous unscientific belief.
As long as you know what the inputs to the system are
I question the assumption that it's easy to know what all the inputs are because the system has grown much more complex than in the days of 8-bit microcomputers. Some inputs are not obvious; for instance, a race condition is an input from the operating system's scheduler.
This book seems genuinely interesting, but I don't understand why a determinist would also be a libertarian. Libertarians value freedom above all other things, but in a deterministic universe no one is free. If causality determines everything then why does it matter if the government is totalitarian or if society breaks down into anarchy? At least the totalitarian government merely LIMITS freedom, whereas the deterministic universe ABOLISHES it (well, technically it never exists). Libertarianism is very much a theory of justice, but in a determined universe nothing can be just, it just simply is.
I believe the universe may be determined (I have no proof to the contrary), but I like to believe that it's not because if it were I don't understand how anything could matter, how anything could have meaning. But Landsburg appears to be a passionate libertarian while maintaining a deterministic position. I just don't see how a political philosophy which values freedom above all other things could possibly be compatible with a causal theory which states that freedom doesn't exist.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Seastead this.
I find it ironic that you are asking for a logically constructed argument, considering the thread's subject of science vs. philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with constructing convincing arguments; science is concerned with empirical evidence.
The proof against protectionist tariffs is empirical not theoretical--when tariffs are dropped, standards of living rise. Over the past 50 years tariffs worldwide have fallen dramatically, and simultaneously living standards around the world have improved dramatically. There is no reason to argue in a vacuum about tariffs when there are decades of economic data to explore.
The problem with asking for a "convincing argument" is that it presupposes such an argument can be constructed from some collection of universally-agreed-upon first principles. But the result is emergent; we simply see it in the data. There may be tremendous arguments about why, but that does not mean it didn't happen.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
One thing I have never been able to figure out is how you can repeat experiments on origins (of matter, of forces, etc).
You form a hypothesis about the big bang happening, and you deduce that if it had happened, then you would be able to observe certain phenomena now, if only your measurements could be made precisely enough. (I'm not a physicist or an astronomer, but maybe the phenomena would involve the residual energy in the vacuum of deep space, or the distribution of certain elements in stars, or something about general relativity, or I don't know what.) When technology has improved enough, or when you have designed a careful enough experiment, you carry out your experiments and see if you observe those phenomena. If you don't see what you should, then you have to say that your hypothesized account of the big bang must be wrong.
This is the way Bi-Coloured Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
Aargh, I hate it when people try to get "smart" about serious subjects, and this one smells a lot like one of those. The explanations and arguments sound superficially OK, but they are deceptive, in that they don't spell out their starting conditions. Take the one about protectionism - it starts from the conclusion: "protectionism is bad, and now we are going to prove it". So they roll out the argument that on average America would be better off without protectionist tariffs - which of course leaves out a lot of details; but apart from that, it is like saying that if 99 people have nothing and 1 person has 1 million, then they are all well off, on average. Yeah, right. On the other hand, if you were to ask one of them, you would still have a 99% chance of hearing that they had nothing.
Same thing with Heisenberg - it is stated as solid fact that "there is nothing to be found ...", which is again smugly claimed nonsense. All we know is that we do not at present have a method of measuring things more precisely than what is described by Heisenberg's inequality; the fundamental problem is the wave-particle nature of the things we measure with: electrons, photons etc. The wave-length sets a lower limit for how precisely we can know the position of any target, and since shorter wave-length mean higher momentum, if we try to get more precise, we hit the target harder, and therefore can't determine its momentum as precisely. That is all we know. The rest of it is just quasi-religious hokum.
Here comes the free market economic BS-
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Suppose that an American sells cameras for $80 but a foreigner wants to sell cameras in America for $60 apiece. An American who would have bought the $80 camera will now buy the $60 camera and hence is better off by $20. The seller now has to sell their own cameras for $60 to stay competitive, so they are worse off by at most $20 -- however, if they voluntarily switch to some other business, then they'll be better off than they were when they were selling cameras for $60, and therefore worse off by some amount less than $20 from their original position. So on balance, abolishing protectionist tariffs would be good for Americans. "Therefore," writes Landsburg, "it seems to me that the protectionist's position is even less respectable than the creationist's. If you're convinced that most scientists are liars -- that everything they say about fossils, for example, is false -- then you can be a logically consistent creationist. But you can't be a logically consistent protectionist."
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Point 1- saying all economists , at least as they're produced today, are idiots is NOT like saying scientists are idiots or you don't believe the fossil record or anything else of the sort. Economics is NOT a science, not even close. No predictive power? no science- done done and done.
The statement about disbelieving the fossil record is an attempt to raise economics to the level of a science, an effort which has been going on at least since Ricardo and forward from there when econ was trying to frame their theories in physics-sounding concepts (equilibrium) in order to glean a pinch of reflected glory. This is known as economic's physics-envy.
Point 2- look the mini-system fo the two camera makers lives inside a larger system of employment, monetary policy, the public's mood and financial picture advancing technology etc etc etc. You can't ignore those things in a complicated chaotic system and yo can't pretend you know how it will all work out. Jesus Christ, just do a little reading outside your field and you'll start to get a better picture of what's going on- read the Walmart Effect and then get back to me about HOW MUCH WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT THE EFFECT OF "FREE TRADE" .. that's the point.. we don't know and people like this guy want to pretend we do ignoring causual relationships that are too compilcated (for now.. with our way of understanding these things) to really analyze. Little vignettes about camera makers ad 20 bucks... wow, therse people are really idiots.
This (unfortunately) reminds me of the ontological argument and similar examples of bad reasoning that manage to avoid being laughed out of the room because they dress themselves in a false shroud of logical rigor.
One version of the ontological argument procedes by defining god to be the being which has the maximal amount of good qualities and continues from there. Now there are other problems with this argument but the giant gaping fallacy is that this simply isn't what people mean by god, a point that wouldn't be lost on anyone if you stripped off all the pretense of extreme rigor and just said, "Hey, something has to be the best thing."
I'm a big fan of using logic to demonstrate that our convential views are incoherent. Indeed, many of the issues mentioned here beg for such a treatment but disguising your hidden assumptions by pointless trapings of rigor (and I'm mathematical logician so I like rigor) gives those of us who actually want to reason about these situations a bad name and enlightens no one.
Grr...I mean just consider the free trade example. It sounds as if he is delibrately trying to slip past the reader that our goal is not to maximize the net inflow of 'dollars' to the US not to mention the existance of inefficent equilibriums. I mean I think nearly every protectionist sympathizer I've ever heard is being a total moron but you don't do anyone any favors by failing to mention that increased utility from trade may require transfer payments to compensate for the disparate impacts of trade. Maybe you oppose these on other grounds but if so you need to state the case. Ohh and BTW given the extremely strong evidence that many Chinese are eager to the point of breaking the law to get these 'sweatshop' jobs maybe the reviewer should try harder to believe that other things being equal they leave an individual better off on balance for taking the job. Perhaps by contemplating how much subsistance farming without modern medicine or convienences sucks.
And the god arguments repeat the same problems. Yes, it's interesting that adults treat religious beliefs differently than other beliefs but saying they don't believe in god doesn't accomplish anything. It just redescribes the situation confusingly. People still let their faith influence their attitudes on many policy questions (which they often also treat differently than beliefs about things they can affect). The ESP bit is even dumber. ESP, like most words, doesn't have a stipulative definition but rather is understood by something like prototype resembelance. It's like the word table, you know some things count and others (a bed) don't and evaluate weird new examples (three legged 2 foot radius stool) by their similarity. Besides, no one cares if 'ESP' exists, people care if people can read minds, remote view etc.. whatever you want to call it.
The only half-decent argument listed is the bit about free will. A better statement would be something like this:
Free will doesn't mean unpredictable/random. A person who heroicly rushes back into a burning building to save a trapped dog is exercising free will in that choice if anyone is even if they would make the same choice everytime you (exactly) replayed the situation. Indeed, if you rewound time and gave it another go and they acted differently that feels less like exercising free will. If free will makes sense then choices I make because of my charachter (how I see myself) surely count and not just choices which we might as well have left up to a coin toss. In other words it seems that what makes a choice free is that I get to select the outcome without outside dictation of the answer.
In other words for a choice to be free it must be possible for me to have acted differently, i.e., if I were inclined to select a different option then I could have done so. It doesn't require the absurd criterion that a free choice must be something that *I* don't determine, e.g., by being the sort of person who will race into burning houses. So
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I feel that you are prejudiced against humans.
Even if the writer seems to me that he was drunk at certain parts and couldn't get straight to the point - I think its a great approach. But I believe that Math has the answer to everything. its just the ultimate analytic tool. I think those social topics should be more connected with each other.