Your thought experiment is interesting, but it treads close to something like solipsism; how can we know that the outcome of *any* given scientific experiment hasn't been meddled with by Descartes' demon?
You'd be just as well off stating that scientists are laboring under some misapprehension of causality.
Besides, you think that the scientists haven't been watching through the windows for that thousand years?
Well, imagine that the iPhone SDK was released under the GPL (notably, NOT the LGPL). If this were the case, all of the programs written with the iPhone SDK would be required to be licensed with the GPL.
By using the SDK, you are relying on someone else's work to produce your software. Apple just happens to want to license the right to use their work in such a way that it prohibits you from using it in the way you want to. Don't like it? Choose a different phone. Work on the OpenMoko. Reverse-engineer and write your own version of the iPhone SDK and figure out how to hack the hardware so that it respects your keys instead of Apple's.
This is exactly the same argument that GPL advocates (including myself) use - if you don't like the author's terms, don't use the author's software. Just because Apple's the author in this case doesn't mean they have any less right to dictate their terms.
Constant need to cast everything? It's been a couple of years since Java 1.5, came out with generics and autoboxing, you know. Unless you're perpetually instantiating objects using reflection, the need to cast is RARE.
Your example of watching your neighbor's house is a good one, because you leave unmentioned the responsibilities with respect to his house that are, indeed, codified and enforced by government - those that regard individual property.
You point was that responsibilities should be codified and enforced by government.
You misunderstand my point entirely. I stated that government is *how* we collectively codify and enforce certain social responsibilities that we have collectively agreed are of a high degree of importance. Not that every responsibility should be so enforced
I absolutely disagree. The right of property necessarily flows from the right of liberty, which necessarily flows from the right of life. Property is the product of our liberty. If the right of property is denied, it rejects the expression of our right of liberty.
Many societies have existed in which no right to property was recognized. In the animal world, there is indeed territorialism (which seems to be what you're advocating) but in that case it's more that territory is yours if you're strong enough to keep it - there is no social contract like what we humans have, where somebody who I have no relationship with (the police) will come and defend my territory if called upon, if for example I'm injured and unable to do so myself. So, I think that your argument here is not very well supported - your assertion that the right of property "flows from the right of liberty" needs a bit of elaboration.
Let's look at trespass as a reasonable example. Here in the U.S., our social contract states that you can't be on someone else's land without permission, and one can call for the enforcement of that contract through the government (you can't, actually, use force yourself according to the law in many places unless you're physically in danger.) In Britain, however, the traditional byways law allows one to cross *anyone's* land so long as you are on a path that has been in use for some period of time. Under that system, there is not considered to be any right to defend against trespass with force, and in fact the force of society (the government) will smack you down if you attempt to do so. Both systems have their notions of personal property, but the responsibilities of the social contracts are different. Calling your particular view of property a "natural right" seems a bit specious to me.
With regard to the Prisoner's Dilemma, it seems to me that guaranteeing universal health care is analogous to a cooperative, and hence mutually beneficial strategy. Of course, there would need t be some restrictions to prevent the abuse of the system, but as it presently stands the lack of such universal care is analogous to those of us that have insurance practicing an "always cooperate" strategy, while those who don't practice an "always betray" strategy and are hence getting benefits (expensive emergency room care that the rest of us have to pay for through higher insurance premiums) at our expense.
Not remotely. I have a responsibility to my neighbor to watch their house while they are away. This is not, and should not, be codified in government. Further, the whole point of government is to secure our individual rights.
Your example of watching your neighbor's house is a good one, because you leave unmentioned the responsibilities with respect to his house that are, indeed, codified and enforced by government - those that regard individual property.
Many, or most, of the individual rights of which you speak are defined by the social contract that I'm talking about. The right to property is not some fact of nature, like, say, life and liberty, and yet it is absolutely critical to how our particular society functions. Many societies have of course existed which didn't have a notion of a right to personal property, but we have instituted our government in such a way as to codify and enforce a common set of beliefs - namely, that individuals can own property and have the right to exclude others from utilizing, indeed, from even treading upon property that they own. Health care may not be a natural right, but it is a mutual social responsibility just as much as it is a mutual social responsibility (and one that we collectively enforce through the judicial branch) to respect the property rights of others.
I do not believe that mutual altruism exists, so... nope.
I agree that indviduals may not be able to have altruistic motivations, but game theory is concerned not with motivation but with altruistic actions. Whether you believe it or not doesn't make a difference; there is good empirical support.
The issue here is not whether I have responsibilities to others, but whether government should be the means by which those responsibilities are codified and enforced.
The whole *point* of government is to codify and enforce those responsibilities toward others; it has no other purpose. Whatever mechanism you have in place for doing so is equivalent to a form of government. As such, we must collectively decide whether universal health care is such a responsibility. If it is, then it is absolutely the place of our government to codify that agreement. If *our* government has been presently been diverted (or subverted) away from its original purpose, that is a separate issue.
So, I will ask again, what do you believe are our respective responsibilities to one another as members of a common society? Why should ensuring one another's physical well being not such a responsibility, given the other mutual responsibilities that we have instantiated as our government?
I deny there is such a thing as a selfless act. Everything we do is because, at root, we WANT to do it, for our own reasons, even if it is just "because doing good for others makes me happy." Every act every person ever does is only properly understood as essentially "selfish." But that is beside the point, I think.I deny there is such a thing as a selfless act. Everything we do is because, at root, we WANT to do it, for our own reasons, even if it is just "because doing good for others makes me happy." Every act every person ever does is only properly understood as essentially "selfish." But that is beside the point, I think.
Whether or not there is such thing as a selfless act has no bearing on the point I am attempting to make. Indeed, mutual altruism is well understood to ultimately benefit individuals (since without the survival of individuals, you have no mechanism for propagating altruistic traits.) Altruism in a game-theoretic sense is simply defined as acting in a manner that at least appears to have no directly quantifiable individual benefit; any benefit must occur because of network effects.
I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that the American public could choose to amend the Constitution to allow the federal government to institute universal health care. The process for doing so is well formalized, and doesn't in any way involve "magically ignoring" the Constitution as it presently exists.
The world changes; our government (and its powers and responsibilities) needs to change accordingly. At present, it's my opinion that the benefits of adopting universal health care would outweigh the costs. That being said, I don't necessarily have anything against handling the issues on a state-by-state basis except for a concern that having a patchwork of different approaches across the nation will result in duplicated effort and the resultant inefficiency and waste.
This is interesting, and is definitely making me think about the tension between individual rights and social responsibilities.
What do you consider our responsibilities to one another to be? Surely there must be some; mutual reliance or support is why social groups exist in the first place. Or has the notion of the social group broken down entirely at this point?
Game theory shows that neither groups of individuals where all are entirely selfish nor those where everyone acts in entirely altruistic ways are stable. The question at hand is whether universal health care would lie to the "excessive" side on the spectrum of mutual altruism. Stability in either case is disrupted by individuals that abuse the system, but universal health care frankly seems to me to be something that would be relatively hard for an individual to abuse. With the exception of hypochondriacs and prescription drug addicts (which such a system could be engineered to cope with), how would one abuse the system? The proportion of the population that actually *wants* to be sick is pretty vanishingly small, I'd think.
It can't be, from my perspective. If it is your right, that means I have to provide it. This is not what the Constitution stands for.
If there is a cost to provide a standard amount of liberty (for of course, we don't have total freedom) which must be borne equally by members of society, how does that differ from a cost to provide a standard amount of care? How do you interpret the statement that we have a right to life?
So, you assert rights can only be things that have 0 cost to provide?
What about liberty? According to all the conservative rhetoric I've heard around the war in recent years, it's supposedly all about preserving liberty, yet you and I have to pay through the nose for it. What makes this different from health care? What good is liberty if you're too sick to do anything with the liberty you have?
Remember that untreated illness often results in inability to work and hence poverty, which results in more untreated illness (say, for family members). A major point behind the notion of universal health care is that we can use it to stop that particular self-reinforcing cycle of poverty. I think it's pretty well established that the costs of poverty are borne by our society as a whole, and not just the impoverished, so even from a conservative viewpoint I can't see how this is a bad thing. Reduce poverty, and you can ultimately reduce all the bureaucratic machinery needed to deal with its effects.
Maybe once we change the voting system to something that obeys the Condorcet criterion, third party candidates will have a chance in winning. But not before then.
Heh... I had a professor in college that had carefully tuned his exams over a period of years so that the distribution of scores was nicely peaked at 50% (and thus, of course, he always graded according to a curve). It always freaked me out to get back my exam with 80% correct... then realize that I had the highest grade in the class. It was one of the best CS classes I ever took - the prof was just as meticulous about his teaching as he was about his exams.
The "community" you speak of essentially doesn't exist any more. Hell, even the chances that family and friends will find out, and that they will mete out any sort of consequences, is probably fairly small.
The only role the President plays in war is to lead the armies...
Oh, how I wish this were true. I think that we'd be a lot less likely to engage in wars of adventure like the current one if the President were legally required to lead the troops in battle. Any leader who isn't willing to put his own life on the line as much as he is willing to risk the lives of others is a coward and a hypocrite.
If the TSA wanted to change, they should look at their screening process to keep from hiring monkeys like this guy.
How many people do you know who would actually WANT to work for TSA? I think they'd be lucky to get 1 applicant in 10 who ISN'T a megalomaniacal idiot.
And supporting Ron Paul is great and idealistic and all, but a complete waste...
And just WHY is supporting Ron Paul a complete waste? Maybe because our plurality voting system guarantees that third, or fourth, or whatever candidates can never be more than spoilers?
And vastly more important than that is the fact that we use plurality voting in this country, ensuring that third party (or third-choice) candidates will always be spoilers and that so long as this continues, we will always be led by individuals chosen by the majority of a minority.
We've seen it over and over in recent elections, from the Nader effect in 2000 to the primaries that are going on right now. When are people going to realize that the current system is broken to the point of being nonsensical insofar as far as elections representing the will of the people is concerned?
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
on
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
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Studying the industrial revolution is about studying the *effects* on society from it. They don't waste time teaching exactly what the first steam engine looked like, and then looking how it changed and was improved over time.
Dang, though, wouldn't history class be a hell of a lot more interesting if they did? Why should social changes be the only things covered in history classes?
I've been meaning to move my domains off of NSI for quite a while, but laziness has kept me from doing so. No longer, after hearing about this practice.
So...
Who's the best registrar to switch to? I've got some stuff hosted with GoDaddy, but have been definitely underwhelmed by their customer service.
Or maybe The Golden Compass was just wretchedly directed?
I swear, with virtually no changes to the script it could have been a decent movie if they'd just made it 20 minutes longer by means of 4-second increments distributed throughout. The pacing was horrendous - it left no time for anything resembling decent character development. Which, of course, is essentially what the first book is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Your thought experiment is interesting, but it treads close to something like solipsism; how can we know that the outcome of *any* given scientific experiment hasn't been meddled with by Descartes' demon?
You'd be just as well off stating that scientists are laboring under some misapprehension of causality.
Besides, you think that the scientists haven't been watching through the windows for that thousand years?
Well, imagine that the iPhone SDK was released under the GPL (notably, NOT the LGPL). If this were the case, all of the programs written with the iPhone SDK would be required to be licensed with the GPL.
By using the SDK, you are relying on someone else's work to produce your software. Apple just happens to want to license the right to use their work in such a way that it prohibits you from using it in the way you want to. Don't like it? Choose a different phone. Work on the OpenMoko. Reverse-engineer and write your own version of the iPhone SDK and figure out how to hack the hardware so that it respects your keys instead of Apple's.
This is exactly the same argument that GPL advocates (including myself) use - if you don't like the author's terms, don't use the author's software. Just because Apple's the author in this case doesn't mean they have any less right to dictate their terms.
Either that, or there are just too damn many idiotic stories that are too obvious to be funny.
Constant need to cast everything? It's been a couple of years since Java 1.5, came out with generics and autoboxing, you know. Unless you're perpetually instantiating objects using reflection, the need to cast is RARE.
You misunderstand my point entirely. I stated that government is *how* we collectively codify and enforce certain social responsibilities that we have collectively agreed are of a high degree of importance. Not that every responsibility should be so enforced
Many societies have existed in which no right to property was recognized. In the animal world, there is indeed territorialism (which seems to be what you're advocating) but in that case it's more that territory is yours if you're strong enough to keep it - there is no social contract like what we humans have, where somebody who I have no relationship with (the police) will come and defend my territory if called upon, if for example I'm injured and unable to do so myself. So, I think that your argument here is not very well supported - your assertion that the right of property "flows from the right of liberty" needs a bit of elaboration.
Let's look at trespass as a reasonable example. Here in the U.S., our social contract states that you can't be on someone else's land without permission, and one can call for the enforcement of that contract through the government (you can't, actually, use force yourself according to the law in many places unless you're physically in danger.) In Britain, however, the traditional byways law allows one to cross *anyone's* land so long as you are on a path that has been in use for some period of time. Under that system, there is not considered to be any right to defend against trespass with force, and in fact the force of society (the government) will smack you down if you attempt to do so. Both systems have their notions of personal property, but the responsibilities of the social contracts are different. Calling your particular view of property a "natural right" seems a bit specious to me.
With regard to the Prisoner's Dilemma, it seems to me that guaranteeing universal health care is analogous to a cooperative, and hence mutually beneficial strategy. Of course, there would need t be some restrictions to prevent the abuse of the system, but as it presently stands the lack of such universal care is analogous to those of us that have insurance practicing an "always cooperate" strategy, while those who don't practice an "always betray" strategy and are hence getting benefits (expensive emergency room care that the rest of us have to pay for through higher insurance premiums) at our expense.
Your example of watching your neighbor's house is a good one, because you leave unmentioned the responsibilities with respect to his house that are, indeed, codified and enforced by government - those that regard individual property.
Many, or most, of the individual rights of which you speak are defined by the social contract that I'm talking about. The right to property is not some fact of nature, like, say, life and liberty, and yet it is absolutely critical to how our particular society functions. Many societies have of course existed which didn't have a notion of a right to personal property, but we have instituted our government in such a way as to codify and enforce a common set of beliefs - namely, that individuals can own property and have the right to exclude others from utilizing, indeed, from even treading upon property that they own. Health care may not be a natural right, but it is a mutual social responsibility just as much as it is a mutual social responsibility (and one that we collectively enforce through the judicial branch) to respect the property rights of others.
I agree that indviduals may not be able to have altruistic motivations, but game theory is concerned not with motivation but with altruistic actions. Whether you believe it or not doesn't make a difference; there is good empirical support.
The whole *point* of government is to codify and enforce those responsibilities toward others; it has no other purpose. Whatever mechanism you have in place for doing so is equivalent to a form of government. As such, we must collectively decide whether universal health care is such a responsibility. If it is, then it is absolutely the place of our government to codify that agreement. If *our* government has been presently been diverted (or subverted) away from its original purpose, that is a separate issue.
So, I will ask again, what do you believe are our respective responsibilities to one another as members of a common society? Why should ensuring one another's physical well being not such a responsibility, given the other mutual responsibilities that we have instantiated as our government?
Whether or not there is such thing as a selfless act has no bearing on the point I am attempting to make. Indeed, mutual altruism is well understood to ultimately benefit individuals (since without the survival of individuals, you have no mechanism for propagating altruistic traits.) Altruism in a game-theoretic sense is simply defined as acting in a manner that at least appears to have no directly quantifiable individual benefit; any benefit must occur because of network effects.
I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that the American public could choose to amend the Constitution to allow the federal government to institute universal health care. The process for doing so is well formalized, and doesn't in any way involve "magically ignoring" the Constitution as it presently exists.
The world changes; our government (and its powers and responsibilities) needs to change accordingly. At present, it's my opinion that the benefits of adopting universal health care would outweigh the costs. That being said, I don't necessarily have anything against handling the issues on a state-by-state basis except for a concern that having a patchwork of different approaches across the nation will result in duplicated effort and the resultant inefficiency and waste.
This is interesting, and is definitely making me think about the tension between individual rights and social responsibilities.
What do you consider our responsibilities to one another to be? Surely there must be some; mutual reliance or support is why social groups exist in the first place. Or has the notion of the social group broken down entirely at this point?
Game theory shows that neither groups of individuals where all are entirely selfish nor those where everyone acts in entirely altruistic ways are stable. The question at hand is whether universal health care would lie to the "excessive" side on the spectrum of mutual altruism. Stability in either case is disrupted by individuals that abuse the system, but universal health care frankly seems to me to be something that would be relatively hard for an individual to abuse. With the exception of hypochondriacs and prescription drug addicts (which such a system could be engineered to cope with), how would one abuse the system? The proportion of the population that actually *wants* to be sick is pretty vanishingly small, I'd think.
If there is a cost to provide a standard amount of liberty (for of course, we don't have total freedom) which must be borne equally by members of society, how does that differ from a cost to provide a standard amount of care? How do you interpret the statement that we have a right to life?
So, you assert rights can only be things that have 0 cost to provide?
What about liberty? According to all the conservative rhetoric I've heard around the war in recent years, it's supposedly all about preserving liberty, yet you and I have to pay through the nose for it. What makes this different from health care? What good is liberty if you're too sick to do anything with the liberty you have?
Remember that untreated illness often results in inability to work and hence poverty, which results in more untreated illness (say, for family members). A major point behind the notion of universal health care is that we can use it to stop that particular self-reinforcing cycle of poverty. I think it's pretty well established that the costs of poverty are borne by our society as a whole, and not just the impoverished, so even from a conservative viewpoint I can't see how this is a bad thing. Reduce poverty, and you can ultimately reduce all the bureaucratic machinery needed to deal with its effects.
Maybe once we change the voting system to something that obeys the Condorcet criterion, third party candidates will have a chance in winning. But not before then.
Heh... I had a professor in college that had carefully tuned his exams over a period of years so that the distribution of scores was nicely peaked at 50% (and thus, of course, he always graded according to a curve). It always freaked me out to get back my exam with 80% correct... then realize that I had the highest grade in the class. It was one of the best CS classes I ever took - the prof was just as meticulous about his teaching as he was about his exams.
The "community" you speak of essentially doesn't exist any more. Hell, even the chances that family and friends will find out, and that they will mete out any sort of consequences, is probably fairly small.
Oh, how I wish this were true. I think that we'd be a lot less likely to engage in wars of adventure like the current one if the President were legally required to lead the troops in battle. Any leader who isn't willing to put his own life on the line as much as he is willing to risk the lives of others is a coward and a hypocrite.
How many people do you know who would actually WANT to work for TSA? I think they'd be lucky to get 1 applicant in 10 who ISN'T a megalomaniacal idiot.
What part of synthesizing do you not understand?
And who the heck modded this insightful?
You haven't heard of the astonishing productivity-enhancer that is screen?
And just WHY is supporting Ron Paul a complete waste? Maybe because our plurality voting system guarantees that third, or fourth, or whatever candidates can never be more than spoilers?
We need to adopt Condorcet methods NOW.
And vastly more important than that is the fact that we use plurality voting in this country, ensuring that third party (or third-choice) candidates will always be spoilers and that so long as this continues, we will always be led by individuals chosen by the majority of a minority.
We've seen it over and over in recent elections, from the Nader effect in 2000 to the primaries that are going on right now. When are people going to realize that the current system is broken to the point of being nonsensical insofar as far as elections representing the will of the people is concerned?
Dang, though, wouldn't history class be a hell of a lot more interesting if they did? Why should social changes be the only things covered in history classes?
I've been meaning to move my domains off of NSI for quite a while, but laziness has kept me from doing so. No longer, after hearing about this practice.
So...
Who's the best registrar to switch to? I've got some stuff hosted with GoDaddy, but have been definitely underwhelmed by their customer service.
4 gigs?
Hell, my webserver (an old Pentium III running Slackware) STILL only has a 2 gig HD in it. And it's not close to full!
Or maybe The Golden Compass was just wretchedly directed?
I swear, with virtually no changes to the script it could have been a decent movie if they'd just made it 20 minutes longer by means of 4-second increments distributed throughout. The pacing was horrendous - it left no time for anything resembling decent character development. Which, of course, is essentially what the first book is all about.
Google Docs auto-saves every few seconds, just like your desktop word processor. Has done so for a couple of years.