Nope. The rattlesnake doesn't need its venom harvested by human labor in order to have and use it.
You're trying to use the example of "Gold is free because there's gold in the ground", which involves ignoring all the labor required to collect that gold.
Nope.
Except when they don't.
Which is never.
Most plants, animals, and microbes don't require human labor in order to reproduce and spread.
I'm pointing out the fallacy of assuming that everything needs human labor in order to get something they want or need. The easiest way to abandon this illusion is to get away from human commerce. But even in the case of humans, one doesn't need humans in order to obtain labor. Automation works to an increasing degree and there's no reason to assume it couldn't eliminate the need for human labor in a variety of tasks.
And all this ignores that presence of human labor is not a definition of capital.
The essence of capitalism is people working for a profit
I already stated the essence of capitalism, private ownership of capital.
Think about it this way: You can be a maid making $500/week keeping a rich person's mansion going; you might make about as much as a cashier at Sears, but you still live in a mansion and eat filet mingon. Sure you don't own any of that stuff, but your job provides you with lodging (in the servant wing of the mansion) and food (from the same damn kitchen).
This is a non sequitur. It is completely irrelevant to the definition of capitalism what a maid does or doesn't have access to in a mansion.
Products always require human labor for production;
Except when they don't.
and humans always seek to reduce their labor while increasing their access to products. It's biology: we want to expend as little energy as possible, increasing survival prospects if food becomes scarce. Rattle snakes shake their rattles to warn away dangerous animals because manufacturing venom takes too much energy--they really don't want to bite you.
So how much human labor does a rattlesnake need to manufacture venom? Looks to me like a good counterexample to one of your own assumptions, that products require human labor. I somehow doubt that rattlesnakes will rattle more because the cost of Chinese labor has gone up, making imported rattlesnake venom more expensive.
Let's consider the basic assumptions of the argument. First, Posner asserts
Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective wayâ"and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech.
There are two things to note. First, the "danger" is not novel or unusual. Nazism is a good previous example of such a dire threat. And we have plenty of over-the-top, hysterical examples throughout the history of the US of foreign ideas like socialism, Catholicism, and other such things (usually imported by immigrants) threatening the US. Somehow the fabric of US society endured.
Second, we have the ludicrous argument that this propaganda is effective on the basis of a single, two person terrorist attack in California (as well as a few others throughout a world of over seven billion people).
Using the law to force Facebook and Twitter to do more to block ISIS propaganda would make sense but also falls short of what is needed. No approach is perfect, but there is a way to deal with these problems.
Blocking ISIS propaganda is "makes sense". "No approach is perfect". We have two more assumptions here. First, that blocking ISIS propaganda is a good idea. and second, that we can ignore how terrible an idea is. Why not advocate the nuking of say, two billion people who happen to be or live near Muslims? No approach is perfect.
Consider Ali Amin, the subject of a recent article in the New York Times. Lonely and bored, the 17-year-old Virginia resident discovered ISIS online, was gradually drawn into its messianic world, eventually exchanged messages with other supporters and members, and then provided some modest logistical support to ISIS supporters (instructing them how to transfer funds secretly and driving an ISIS recruit to the airport). He was convicted of the crime of material support of terrorism and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Amin did not start out as a jihadi; he was made into one.
Dude had his computer hacked. He didn't mean to try to help kill people. It just sort of happened with all this bad content forced on his computer screen. Here, the implicit assumption is that people can't be responsible for their actions when it comes to this insidious jihad stuff.
In one case the seemingly naÃve individual posted general questions about religion, to which ISIS supporters quickly responded in a calm and authoritative manner. After a few weeks, the accounts of hardened ISIS supporters slowly introduced increasingly ardent views into the conversation. The new recruit was then invited to continue [conversing] privately, often via Twitterâ(TM)s Direct Message feature or on other private messaging platforms such as surespot.
This reminds me of the hysterical exhortations about the danger of recreational drugs and how drug users are lured into a shadow world of sin and iniquity.
But there is something we can do to protect people like Amin from being infected by the ISIS virus by propagandists, many of whom are anonymous and most of whom live in foreign countries. Consider a law that makes it a crime to access websites that glorify, express support for, or provide encouragement for ISIS or support recruitment by ISIS; to distribute links to those websites or videos, images, or text taken from those websites; or to encourage people to access such websites by supplying them with links or instructions. Such a law would be directed at people like Amin: naÃve people, rather than sophisticated terrorists, who are initially driven by curiosity to research ISIS on the Web.
Because punishing people for reading the wrong websites will work. When he discovers that sending people to jail, als
I guess it's a matter of debate whether you call Proof Theory (and its parent, metalogic) math or philosophy or both, but you seem to be calling all systems of formal reasoning "math", which isn't what most people mean.
Most people don't understand the subject well enough to have an opinion.
You won't get far in physics without math, but they're nevertheless distinct fields. Math is a tool used in many fields.
And the reason they are distinct is because physics has distinctly non-mathematical subject matter and goals.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist?
Because it hasn't been proven not to, and it's the job of philosophers to take on such problems. Whenever a good, practical answer is found to such fundamental questions, it stops being philosophy and becomes some new discipline. Sure, it's quite rare, but it's important when it happens.
It's worth noting that I already mentioned a couple of cases where impossibility has been proven. Economics has plenty more like these. When people or other relevant parties want different things that can't be simultaneously satisfied, which happens all the time, then that's it. You can't do what can't be done.
You either have to compromise/trade (for which we have plenty of well demonstrated economic systems which are adequate), develop a technology or infrastructure that allows you to do the currently impossible (which is usually something of a long shot), or perhaps change peoples' wants (say via propaganda/advertising). Philosophy doesn't really have much to add in this matter.
They can make it illegal, but it continues. State taking ownership of everything just means capitalist have to hide their operating capital.
Capitalism is like a force of nature, you can ban it, but it continues anyhow.
You can't have underground cars and underground highways. The sort of thing underground capitalism builds now is stuff like recreational drugs or smuggling networks where the end product is an ephemeral good or service. This is in capitalists societies where the infrastructure can be hidden midst a lot of legal privately capitalist infrastructure which can be readily repurposed for illegal activities.
There are two things to note for societies where capitalism is illegal. First, though illegal capitalism can still happen, it's vastly diminished in scale and what sort of goods and services can be offered. Second, because it is illegal, it is never part of the main societal economy and can't access the legal and trade infrastructure of the main society.
You won't get the massive black markets of the modern world like the current systems of drug trade or people smuggling. You'll get small, stunted systems with little relevance to the main society.
And it still remains that ownership of capital is illegal and hence, the society is not capitalist by definition.
Actually, there's no such thing as a non-capitalist system.
Sure, there is. The USSR was an example. There was no private ownership of capital and hence, it was non-capitalist by definition.
You appear to be claiming that presence of human labor is capitalism. That's patently not true since human labor is not capital and need not be owned by a private source (eg, slavery), even if we did decide to define it as capital.
In any case, you can't reason very far about "does math work" using math - that's the fundamental problem of meta-logic. How you you reason about the boundaries of a system of reasoning? You can't prove that a system of reasoning is good using that same system, obviously (though you can't sometimes prove it doesn't, though contradiction).
Mathematics has done quite a good job of studying this. It is known that any sufficiently complex system of proof or mathematics has statements that can't be proven in the system. This includes an inability to determine whether the system is consistent (that is, completely without paradox). Similarly, there is a lot of case study on the constraints of applying math to the physical world. Philosophy can't improve on that.
strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Sure, but that's only relevant once you have first principles to reason from. Where do those come from? What sort of system of evaluation even makes sense in this realm? That's the field of Meta-Ethics: how could you know or prove that an ethical system was correct?
It's also relevant if you have desired outcomes and are trying to figure out spaces of basic principles that lead to the desired outcomes.
If one looks at actual attempts at ethics, basic principles are never developed completely in vacuum. There are always some real world situation or pattern that the proposer of the axioms is trying to abstract. Math or logic is very important to evaluating choices of axioms or to precluding certain sorts of axioms in a simple way.
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest.
How is that not a key difficulty of ethics? We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes. Similarly for political systems and political debate, where honest debate barely exists. It's a hard philosophical problem, one I doubt we'll solve this century.
It's not the difficulty of resolving conflicts of interest that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest themselves. If we want conflicting goals out of our system of ethics, then nothing will simultaneously fully satisfy us.
We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist? Blatantly contradictory goals can't be simultaneously resolved. Even stuff that appears to be resolvable, like a voting system that satisfies a variety of reasonable sounding axioms can be contradictory.
The problem is that you are suffering from two-bit thinking - literally. For you it's either a choice between leaving them alone or engaging in hot war, because your mind is incapable of understanding subtlety, adaptivity, and planning ahead. Bullshit analogies with France serve to further cloud your judgement. Your analogy with Germany is bullshit because we HAVE been intervening in the middle east militarily for about three decades now, and it's always under the guise of "let's keep more bad things from happening." Something which uniformly backfires.
Where was your higher level thinking when you wrote things like:
ISIS isn't Nazi Germany. It's foremost an ideology, and secondarily a pseudo-state that lays claim to some pathetic scrap of territory, in the midst of several well-armed modern militaries. Can ISIS take over all of the ME? Sure... but the only way is for it to take over ideologically. And the quickest way for that to happen is for us to wage an apocalyptic grand war against it.
or
I just don't understand your train of thought. ISIS is bad? Sure. I don't see how that leads to BOMB THE EVER LIVING SHIT OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NOW AND ETERNITY
Also, oligopolic and monopolic companies are great at long standing incompetence (or flat-out evil and/or anti-competitive behavior). Remember all those banks that bought subprime mortgages, decimated Western economies and are by and large still alive and kicking? How about Intel's strategies to stay on top? Microsoft's?
Sounds to me like you don't know what incompetence is. If I become wealthy (or otherwise massively rewarded) by "incompetent" behavior, then it isn't really incompetent behavior.
The real problem here is actually how to define (in)competence. Making the largest amount of profit is not necessarily great for the world. If anything, we've seen that it provides a huge incentive to externalize societal costs, skirt or break the law, evade taxes in the most elaborate ways, lie profusely, play into primal drives (although, to be honest, politicians all over the world are all really getting the hang of this PR and marketing thing nowadays), etc. In a way, it is reason for envy: these guys are great at making a buck and are ruthless in that making. On the other hand, it is time to realize that even if there is (and there needn't be) a sizable amount of spending inefficiency in governments, it is by far the lesser of the evils to deal with.
Notice how many of those things require a compliant government to enable? Can't evade taxes that no one collects. Can't break a law, if the activity is legal. Further, we've always had these negative behaviors. Somehow we not only managed to get by, but thrive under circumstances that in theory are much more adverse than today.
But meanwhile we haven't always had government this powerful or consuming such a large portion of our democracies's resources. No, it must be the evil profit suddenly becoming a threat. Your favorite evil multinational must have its government sugar in order to prevent greed.
Pretty much all telecom privatizations. Longer customer service waiting times, lower customer satisfaction, artificially inflated prices. It's harder to find a case where that didn't happen.
Telecoms that are no longer heavily subsidized, unable to hide their costs from people who don't know to look for them.
This is the only thing that matters. People bitch like crazy about roads, but when the time comes to pony up to pay for them, everybody bitches and moans about how the government is stealing their money. When the government doesn't build new roads or add lanes, people bitch about traffic and how it is killing productivity (which is exactly what would happen if the budget went mostly to repairs).
You can't scream that government doesn't work, then give them less money to do a bigger job, then say 'I told you so! They suck!'.
The evergreen "it's all your fault" theory of blame transference.
The problem here is that fiscal responsibility is a reactionary policy. The problems you speak of predate the reaction. And why is it more important which particular thing people "bitch and moan" about than whether or not you have a functioning road system? "We could do something that wasn't profoundly stupid, but people would bitch and moan about that too. So let's do the profoundly stupid thing."
It was terrible talking to you. You may have the last word.
Back at you, well aside from having the last word. I have heard enough.
. As a researcher in AI undoing damage from people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking is a monumental task.
[...]
but know jack shit about AI and should shut the fuck up about it.
It would help if you knew more than jack shit either. None of us know what AI could do. All we have are some incredibly weak thermodynamic constraints.
Does it? As far as I can tell, the decision to stay away from the war was a wise one. Pearl Harbor was bad but it would have been much worse to come in direct conflict with Hitler in 1938.
It would have been so much worse, if France had done it in 1936, after Germany militarized the Rhine, ending the Second World War before it began.Unfortunately, the profound irrationality of pre-war France seems to mirror similar irrationality today in the US and many other modern democracies.
For example, France of the time had constructed the Treaty of Versailles in order that Germany never harm France ever again. But when the treaty proved too onerous for anyone to respect, they looked the other way while Germany started rebuilding its military. Meaning that the treaty served but to delay German military build up by a few years. Given that it was a cause for the Nazi rise to power, that delay may not have been worth causing the Second World War.
France then built the Maginot line which remains one of the epic defensive structures of human history. But they refused to protect themselves from a route that Germany had taken less than two decades before (and would take once again).
Instead of acting to halt Nazi aggression in its first huge gambles or extended defensive structures to cover obvious attack routes, France became one of the early victims.
We see the same thing happening to the US though on a currently less dangerous scale. The current president is doing a Vietnam-like military buildup in Iraq a few short years after having completely left the country. The previous president created much of ISIS's effectiveness (and much of Iraq's instability) by banning Ba'athists from holding positions in the Iraqi government and by a terrible rebuilding strategy in Iraq (such as contracting so much rebuilding to outside, corrupt vendors rather than helping to grow Iraq's economy). One doesn't commit such profoundly stupid strategic blunders without consequence.
Of course what happens in the ME has an effect on us. It's such a globalized world that it's impossible to fart without affecting someone. And that's why the best way to deal with ISIS is to get the fuck out.
And then when Iraq or Saudi Arabia collapses the US is back in. Or ISIS kills a million people. Or whatever. This argument is also profoundly stupid strategically because it is quite obvious that there is a lot to pull the US back into any conflict in the Middle East.
I just don't understand your train of thought. ISIS is bad? Sure. I don't see how that leads to BOMB THE EVER LIVING SHIT OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NOW AND ETERNITY
Just as you wouldn't have understood how allowing the bad guys of the Second World War to thrive led to bombing the ever living shit out of Europe or the development of nuclear weapons? Things happen even when you don't understand them.
It is also peculiar how you pull out this straw man even though no one in this thread said anything about leveling the Middle East. In fact, the whole point of intervening now is so that someone doesn't have to level the Middle East for all eternity or whatever.
Now, the question here should be is ISIS enough of a threat to require intervention? I think the answer is an obvious yes for two reasons. First, they are already causing tremendous harm both in the region (genocide) and to US allies in the area and in Europe (not just speaking of terrorist attacks, but also of forcing the immigration of something like two million people into Europe). Second, their rapid rise to power should be an obvious warning sign that external stabilizing forces are needed. Even if ISIS collapses in the next few years, there will be more such groups. Refusing to deal with them or to protect allies from them, will eventually result in much of the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere falling under their sway.
The things that are said of ISIS's ineffectiveness
If I have 10 apples and I put 5 of those apples in a huge pile of apples, what part of my apples have I put in the pile?
Why not put in ten apples then, if what you get out of that huge pile of apples is so awesome? Or is it that you won't get even a slight bit more as a result? Just because five apples appears a lot to you doesn't mean it's a lot to the huge pile of apples. And that's what matters when it comes to what you'll get out of putting your five apples in. You could put in ten apples, which is even more to you, but it still an insignificant fraction of that huge pile. And so you don't get double out what you put in.
Certainly, by the time we get to a large country, we have plenty of people who will be assholes to someone they don't even know and will never meet.
Exactly. Your analogy was shit to the point of being completely unusable.
I get that in your little world, analogies don't exist. But in the real world, we use them all the time. And reading along your post, I get a strong impression you not only don't have a clue about this stuff, but are viciously opposed to getting one. Still let's give it the old college try.
This analogy was valid because it shows the same dynamics: people contributing fixed amounts which are almost independent of how much they consume. And let's consider the core of your argument on the matter:
Deciding whether to buy fucking dinner is a very different decision than deciding to spend money on fundamental research or improving the infrastructure of a country
It's "different". So what? Analogies work on things being similar not identical. Similar things are different and dissimilar things are different too. So of course, food is different from scientific research. You have to establish that the differences matter.
Here, it's still a choice. There is still a group pooling resources. Individuals still have poor incentive to cut costs or reduce inefficiencies, because a pooled effort doesn't yield significant incentives to the individual (unless there happens to be an explicit bonus or windfall for doing that). It doesn't matter if you're buying lunch, research, or infrastructure. The lack of incentives to cut costs are still there. The tragedy of the commons is still there.
I think I read in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that this is bullshit. It was, like, science.
I already explained to you why the Tragedy of the Commons does not apply.
Good, put that in a post. I think it'll end up being nonsense, but it'll be educational should you choose to listen.
The more considerable inefficiency of government
Unsaid, unproven and thus inadmissible. It is a fallacy, specifically: a loaded statement.
(Technically, the opposite is starting to become apparent. In many places where privatization has been attempted costs have gone down, but simultaneously the quality of service has gone down faster, leading to a far worse ratio than when the 'inefficient' government ran that part of the sector)
Quality of service is not in isolation a measure of efficiency. After all, you noted that costs went down. As to "leading to a far worse ratio", show a case where this actually happened with a numerical metric for quality of service that isn't laughable.
Everything has the "not working properly" bit set.
No. You are the one making this black-and-white (the fallacy of the excluded middle / false dichotomy). I used logic that is much closer to reality and thus a better basis for reasoning, namely fuzzy logic: "all institutions are unreliable to some extent".
Amazing, you are still pulling this shit. Now, it's the "unreliable to some extent" bit which is set. Here's two clues as to why I keep harping on this crap. First, when you
I think that's more likely to happen than catastrophic AGW by 2100. There is this remarkable inability to show that there's a real problem from climate change despite a vast amount of effort.
Yet, on average, PhD unemployment is around 4% or so (and most of that is, I would guess, voluntary unemployment e.g. burnout). So that's really no excuse.
I'm pointing out that while it may be hard to find talented scientists, it's a problem that is solved to the point that they are being overproduced by a lot.
Oklahoma City might be called terrorism, since it had a political goal (and indeed, McVeigh even feels his goals were somewhat achieved), but McVeigh wasn't trying to scare or kill average people.
But he was targeting civilians (I gather either to target the ATF office present there or generic federal employees). That's average enough.
Unless, the actual temperature forcing of CO2 is much lower than advertised. Then we might be many decades to a few centuries away from where we think we currently are.
Global warming at this point is inevitable. Even probably 5 C warming. Some are arguing 8 C by the end of the century. However, its not the end of the world. Just a radically different one.
How about 1.5-2.5C by 2100 in exchange for giving most of the world a developed world standard of living? Sounds a good trade to me.
That is great and all. Do you realize that the entire field of mathematics is a subset of philosophy. Boolean algebra is a part of mathematics that ties in more to the other parts of philosophy.
In mathematics the meaning of the equal sign is taken for granted. To be able to disprove it you have to go into philosophy.
This is not even wrong territory. You don't disprove meaning any more than you drive red.
It's also very similar to splitting up businesses much smaller than the current merger. You need a better argument here.
My view is that huge businesses are directly a result of onerous regulation. The largest businesses have the economies of scale to deal with the overhead of regulation and the resulting corruption of regulators.
Want a competitive marketplace? Make it possible for small and medium scale businesses to thrive.
Seriously, the more brains and CPUs you throw at it, the worse it'll be.
That hasn't been a problem in previous recessions nor will it be the problem in the next recession. The usual problem as in the recent real estate crisis has been leverage combined with easy money. Enough leverage and trading in government bonds becomes as risky as juggling chainsaws.
Also, it's worth noting that financial trading has a lot of cutting edge research. It beats a lot of other work you could be doing, including one-year-at-a-time college lecture positions.
To be fair to them, it's a very tough time for fundamental physics right now. Progress is insanely expensive, funding is all but non-existent, it's hard to find talented scientists who actually want to study it, and the general public just isn't interested anymore.
It's worth noting here that there is an overproduction of PhDs in all areas of theoretical physics (and not by a little bit either, I'd estimate at least a factor of two myself, due to the number of people who publish a few times and then drop off the radar), vast sums are being thrown at fundamental physics, and the general public is as interested as they get for something they'll never understand.
The existence of Yaweh or the Flying Spaghetti monster fits completely within your scientific framework. They just can't be falsified now.
They can't be falsified later either. That's the huge difference between supernatural deities and a theory that just needs more work and more technological advancement on the experimental side.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, you want rattlesnake venom?
Nope. The rattlesnake doesn't need its venom harvested by human labor in order to have and use it.
You're trying to use the example of "Gold is free because there's gold in the ground", which involves ignoring all the labor required to collect that gold.
Nope.
Except when they don't.
Which is never.
Most plants, animals, and microbes don't require human labor in order to reproduce and spread.
I'm pointing out the fallacy of assuming that everything needs human labor in order to get something they want or need. The easiest way to abandon this illusion is to get away from human commerce. But even in the case of humans, one doesn't need humans in order to obtain labor. Automation works to an increasing degree and there's no reason to assume it couldn't eliminate the need for human labor in a variety of tasks.
And all this ignores that presence of human labor is not a definition of capital.
The essence of capitalism is people working for a profit
I already stated the essence of capitalism, private ownership of capital.
Think about it this way: You can be a maid making $500/week keeping a rich person's mansion going; you might make about as much as a cashier at Sears, but you still live in a mansion and eat filet mingon. Sure you don't own any of that stuff, but your job provides you with lodging (in the servant wing of the mansion) and food (from the same damn kitchen).
This is a non sequitur. It is completely irrelevant to the definition of capitalism what a maid does or doesn't have access to in a mansion.
Products always require human labor for production;
Except when they don't.
and humans always seek to reduce their labor while increasing their access to products. It's biology: we want to expend as little energy as possible, increasing survival prospects if food becomes scarce. Rattle snakes shake their rattles to warn away dangerous animals because manufacturing venom takes too much energy--they really don't want to bite you.
So how much human labor does a rattlesnake need to manufacture venom? Looks to me like a good counterexample to one of your own assumptions, that products require human labor. I somehow doubt that rattlesnakes will rattle more because the cost of Chinese labor has gone up, making imported rattlesnake venom more expensive.
Never before in our history have enemies outside the United States been able to propagate genuinely dangerous ideas on American territory in such an effective wayâ"and by this I mean ideas that lead directly to terrorist attacks that kill people. The novelty of this threat calls for new thinking about limits on freedom of speech.
There are two things to note. First, the "danger" is not novel or unusual. Nazism is a good previous example of such a dire threat. And we have plenty of over-the-top, hysterical examples throughout the history of the US of foreign ideas like socialism, Catholicism, and other such things (usually imported by immigrants) threatening the US. Somehow the fabric of US society endured.
Second, we have the ludicrous argument that this propaganda is effective on the basis of a single, two person terrorist attack in California (as well as a few others throughout a world of over seven billion people).
Using the law to force Facebook and Twitter to do more to block ISIS propaganda would make sense but also falls short of what is needed. No approach is perfect, but there is a way to deal with these problems.
Blocking ISIS propaganda is "makes sense". "No approach is perfect". We have two more assumptions here. First, that blocking ISIS propaganda is a good idea. and second, that we can ignore how terrible an idea is. Why not advocate the nuking of say, two billion people who happen to be or live near Muslims? No approach is perfect.
Consider Ali Amin, the subject of a recent article in the New York Times. Lonely and bored, the 17-year-old Virginia resident discovered ISIS online, was gradually drawn into its messianic world, eventually exchanged messages with other supporters and members, and then provided some modest logistical support to ISIS supporters (instructing them how to transfer funds secretly and driving an ISIS recruit to the airport). He was convicted of the crime of material support of terrorism and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Amin did not start out as a jihadi; he was made into one.
Dude had his computer hacked. He didn't mean to try to help kill people. It just sort of happened with all this bad content forced on his computer screen. Here, the implicit assumption is that people can't be responsible for their actions when it comes to this insidious jihad stuff.
In one case the seemingly naÃve individual posted general questions about religion, to which ISIS supporters quickly responded in a calm and authoritative manner. After a few weeks, the accounts of hardened ISIS supporters slowly introduced increasingly ardent views into the conversation. The new recruit was then invited to continue [conversing] privately, often via Twitterâ(TM)s Direct Message feature or on other private messaging platforms such as surespot.
This reminds me of the hysterical exhortations about the danger of recreational drugs and how drug users are lured into a shadow world of sin and iniquity.
But there is something we can do to protect people like Amin from being infected by the ISIS virus by propagandists, many of whom are anonymous and most of whom live in foreign countries. Consider a law that makes it a crime to access websites that glorify, express support for, or provide encouragement for ISIS or support recruitment by ISIS; to distribute links to those websites or videos, images, or text taken from those websites; or to encourage people to access such websites by supplying them with links or instructions. Such a law would be directed at people like Amin: naÃve people, rather than sophisticated terrorists, who are initially driven by curiosity to research ISIS on the Web.
Because punishing people for reading the wrong websites will work. When he discovers that sending people to jail, als
I guess it's a matter of debate whether you call Proof Theory (and its parent, metalogic) math or philosophy or both, but you seem to be calling all systems of formal reasoning "math", which isn't what most people mean.
Most people don't understand the subject well enough to have an opinion.
You won't get far in physics without math, but they're nevertheless distinct fields. Math is a tool used in many fields.
And the reason they are distinct is because physics has distinctly non-mathematical subject matter and goals.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist?
Because it hasn't been proven not to, and it's the job of philosophers to take on such problems. Whenever a good, practical answer is found to such fundamental questions, it stops being philosophy and becomes some new discipline. Sure, it's quite rare, but it's important when it happens.
It's worth noting that I already mentioned a couple of cases where impossibility has been proven. Economics has plenty more like these. When people or other relevant parties want different things that can't be simultaneously satisfied, which happens all the time, then that's it. You can't do what can't be done.
You either have to compromise/trade (for which we have plenty of well demonstrated economic systems which are adequate), develop a technology or infrastructure that allows you to do the currently impossible (which is usually something of a long shot), or perhaps change peoples' wants (say via propaganda/advertising). Philosophy doesn't really have much to add in this matter.
Just like dwarf planets are not planets and faux pearls are not pearls.
They can make it illegal, but it continues. State taking ownership of everything just means capitalist have to hide their operating capital.
Capitalism is like a force of nature, you can ban it, but it continues anyhow.
You can't have underground cars and underground highways. The sort of thing underground capitalism builds now is stuff like recreational drugs or smuggling networks where the end product is an ephemeral good or service. This is in capitalists societies where the infrastructure can be hidden midst a lot of legal privately capitalist infrastructure which can be readily repurposed for illegal activities.
There are two things to note for societies where capitalism is illegal. First, though illegal capitalism can still happen, it's vastly diminished in scale and what sort of goods and services can be offered. Second, because it is illegal, it is never part of the main societal economy and can't access the legal and trade infrastructure of the main society.
You won't get the massive black markets of the modern world like the current systems of drug trade or people smuggling. You'll get small, stunted systems with little relevance to the main society.
And it still remains that ownership of capital is illegal and hence, the society is not capitalist by definition.
There was no private ownership of capital.
Sounds like state capitalism.
State capitalism is not capitalism.
Actually, there's no such thing as a non-capitalist system.
Sure, there is. The USSR was an example. There was no private ownership of capital and hence, it was non-capitalist by definition.
You appear to be claiming that presence of human labor is capitalism. That's patently not true since human labor is not capital and need not be owned by a private source (eg, slavery), even if we did decide to define it as capital.
Possibly, but there is an upper limit to the processing power and energy available to an AI
Yes, it's exactly the same processing power and energy available to the human race. Do you see the problem now?
In any case, you can't reason very far about "does math work" using math - that's the fundamental problem of meta-logic. How you you reason about the boundaries of a system of reasoning? You can't prove that a system of reasoning is good using that same system, obviously (though you can't sometimes prove it doesn't, though contradiction).
Mathematics has done quite a good job of studying this. It is known that any sufficiently complex system of proof or mathematics has statements that can't be proven in the system. This includes an inability to determine whether the system is consistent (that is, completely without paradox). Similarly, there is a lot of case study on the constraints of applying math to the physical world. Philosophy can't improve on that.
strongly disagree. For starters, a key requirement of ethics is consistency (that is, you try for a system with objectivity) which brings in logic and mathematics.
Sure, but that's only relevant once you have first principles to reason from. Where do those come from? What sort of system of evaluation even makes sense in this realm? That's the field of Meta-Ethics: how could you know or prove that an ethical system was correct?
It's also relevant if you have desired outcomes and are trying to figure out spaces of basic principles that lead to the desired outcomes.
If one looks at actual attempts at ethics, basic principles are never developed completely in vacuum. There are always some real world situation or pattern that the proposer of the axioms is trying to abstract. Math or logic is very important to evaluating choices of axioms or to precluding certain sorts of axioms in a simple way.
It's not the difficulties of ethics that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest.
How is that not a key difficulty of ethics? We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes. Similarly for political systems and political debate, where honest debate barely exists. It's a hard philosophical problem, one I doubt we'll solve this century.
It's not the difficulty of resolving conflicts of interest that make general agreement difficult. It's the conflicts of interest themselves. If we want conflicting goals out of our system of ethics, then nothing will simultaneously fully satisfy us.
We're not very good yet at reasoning about ethical systems as we don't have a good structure to shield the process from individuals desired, self-serving outcomes.
Why should we expect that such a structure can exist? Blatantly contradictory goals can't be simultaneously resolved. Even stuff that appears to be resolvable, like a voting system that satisfies a variety of reasonable sounding axioms can be contradictory.
Baseless extrapolations from one data point? You must be an average American. Grats! We'll hot drop a pretty flag to your location.
The problem is that you are suffering from two-bit thinking - literally. For you it's either a choice between leaving them alone or engaging in hot war, because your mind is incapable of understanding subtlety, adaptivity, and planning ahead. Bullshit analogies with France serve to further cloud your judgement. Your analogy with Germany is bullshit because we HAVE been intervening in the middle east militarily for about three decades now, and it's always under the guise of "let's keep more bad things from happening." Something which uniformly backfires.
Where was your higher level thinking when you wrote things like:
ISIS isn't Nazi Germany. It's foremost an ideology, and secondarily a pseudo-state that lays claim to some pathetic scrap of territory, in the midst of several well-armed modern militaries. Can ISIS take over all of the ME? Sure... but the only way is for it to take over ideologically. And the quickest way for that to happen is for us to wage an apocalyptic grand war against it.
or
I just don't understand your train of thought. ISIS is bad? Sure. I don't see how that leads to BOMB THE EVER LIVING SHIT OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NOW AND ETERNITY
No bit thinking is even worse.
But sure, let's use nuance.
Also, oligopolic and monopolic companies are great at long standing incompetence (or flat-out evil and/or anti-competitive behavior). Remember all those banks that bought subprime mortgages, decimated Western economies and are by and large still alive and kicking? How about Intel's strategies to stay on top? Microsoft's?
Sounds to me like you don't know what incompetence is. If I become wealthy (or otherwise massively rewarded) by "incompetent" behavior, then it isn't really incompetent behavior.
The real problem here is actually how to define (in)competence. Making the largest amount of profit is not necessarily great for the world. If anything, we've seen that it provides a huge incentive to externalize societal costs, skirt or break the law, evade taxes in the most elaborate ways, lie profusely, play into primal drives (although, to be honest, politicians all over the world are all really getting the hang of this PR and marketing thing nowadays), etc. In a way, it is reason for envy: these guys are great at making a buck and are ruthless in that making. On the other hand, it is time to realize that even if there is (and there needn't be) a sizable amount of spending inefficiency in governments, it is by far the lesser of the evils to deal with.
Notice how many of those things require a compliant government to enable? Can't evade taxes that no one collects. Can't break a law, if the activity is legal. Further, we've always had these negative behaviors. Somehow we not only managed to get by, but thrive under circumstances that in theory are much more adverse than today.
But meanwhile we haven't always had government this powerful or consuming such a large portion of our democracies's resources. No, it must be the evil profit suddenly becoming a threat. Your favorite evil multinational must have its government sugar in order to prevent greed.
Pretty much all telecom privatizations. Longer customer service waiting times, lower customer satisfaction, artificially inflated prices. It's harder to find a case where that didn't happen.
Telecoms that are no longer heavily subsidized, unable to hide their costs from people who don't know to look for them.
This is the only thing that matters. People bitch like crazy about roads, but when the time comes to pony up to pay for them, everybody bitches and moans about how the government is stealing their money. When the government doesn't build new roads or add lanes, people bitch about traffic and how it is killing productivity (which is exactly what would happen if the budget went mostly to repairs). You can't scream that government doesn't work, then give them less money to do a bigger job, then say 'I told you so! They suck!'.
The evergreen "it's all your fault" theory of blame transference.
The problem here is that fiscal responsibility is a reactionary policy. The problems you speak of predate the reaction. And why is it more important which particular thing people "bitch and moan" about than whether or not you have a functioning road system? "We could do something that wasn't profoundly stupid, but people would bitch and moan about that too. So let's do the profoundly stupid thing."
It was terrible talking to you. You may have the last word.
Back at you, well aside from having the last word. I have heard enough.
. As a researcher in AI undoing damage from people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking is a monumental task.
[...]
but know jack shit about AI and should shut the fuck up about it.
It would help if you knew more than jack shit either. None of us know what AI could do. All we have are some incredibly weak thermodynamic constraints.
Does it? As far as I can tell, the decision to stay away from the war was a wise one. Pearl Harbor was bad but it would have been much worse to come in direct conflict with Hitler in 1938.
It would have been so much worse, if France had done it in 1936, after Germany militarized the Rhine, ending the Second World War before it began.Unfortunately, the profound irrationality of pre-war France seems to mirror similar irrationality today in the US and many other modern democracies.
For example, France of the time had constructed the Treaty of Versailles in order that Germany never harm France ever again. But when the treaty proved too onerous for anyone to respect, they looked the other way while Germany started rebuilding its military. Meaning that the treaty served but to delay German military build up by a few years. Given that it was a cause for the Nazi rise to power, that delay may not have been worth causing the Second World War.
France then built the Maginot line which remains one of the epic defensive structures of human history. But they refused to protect themselves from a route that Germany had taken less than two decades before (and would take once again).
Instead of acting to halt Nazi aggression in its first huge gambles or extended defensive structures to cover obvious attack routes, France became one of the early victims.
We see the same thing happening to the US though on a currently less dangerous scale. The current president is doing a Vietnam-like military buildup in Iraq a few short years after having completely left the country. The previous president created much of ISIS's effectiveness (and much of Iraq's instability) by banning Ba'athists from holding positions in the Iraqi government and by a terrible rebuilding strategy in Iraq (such as contracting so much rebuilding to outside, corrupt vendors rather than helping to grow Iraq's economy). One doesn't commit such profoundly stupid strategic blunders without consequence.
Of course what happens in the ME has an effect on us. It's such a globalized world that it's impossible to fart without affecting someone. And that's why the best way to deal with ISIS is to get the fuck out.
And then when Iraq or Saudi Arabia collapses the US is back in. Or ISIS kills a million people. Or whatever. This argument is also profoundly stupid strategically because it is quite obvious that there is a lot to pull the US back into any conflict in the Middle East.
I just don't understand your train of thought. ISIS is bad? Sure. I don't see how that leads to BOMB THE EVER LIVING SHIT OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST FOR NOW AND ETERNITY
Just as you wouldn't have understood how allowing the bad guys of the Second World War to thrive led to bombing the ever living shit out of Europe or the development of nuclear weapons? Things happen even when you don't understand them.
It is also peculiar how you pull out this straw man even though no one in this thread said anything about leveling the Middle East. In fact, the whole point of intervening now is so that someone doesn't have to level the Middle East for all eternity or whatever.
Now, the question here should be is ISIS enough of a threat to require intervention? I think the answer is an obvious yes for two reasons. First, they are already causing tremendous harm both in the region (genocide) and to US allies in the area and in Europe (not just speaking of terrorist attacks, but also of forcing the immigration of something like two million people into Europe). Second, their rapid rise to power should be an obvious warning sign that external stabilizing forces are needed. Even if ISIS collapses in the next few years, there will be more such groups. Refusing to deal with them or to protect allies from them, will eventually result in much of the Middle East and perhaps elsewhere falling under their sway.
The things that are said of ISIS's ineffectiveness
If I have 10 apples and I put 5 of those apples in a huge pile of apples, what part of my apples have I put in the pile?
Why not put in ten apples then, if what you get out of that huge pile of apples is so awesome? Or is it that you won't get even a slight bit more as a result? Just because five apples appears a lot to you doesn't mean it's a lot to the huge pile of apples. And that's what matters when it comes to what you'll get out of putting your five apples in. You could put in ten apples, which is even more to you, but it still an insignificant fraction of that huge pile. And so you don't get double out what you put in.
Certainly, by the time we get to a large country, we have plenty of people who will be assholes to someone they don't even know and will never meet.
Exactly. Your analogy was shit to the point of being completely unusable.
I get that in your little world, analogies don't exist. But in the real world, we use them all the time. And reading along your post, I get a strong impression you not only don't have a clue about this stuff, but are viciously opposed to getting one. Still let's give it the old college try.
This analogy was valid because it shows the same dynamics: people contributing fixed amounts which are almost independent of how much they consume. And let's consider the core of your argument on the matter:
Deciding whether to buy fucking dinner is a very different decision than deciding to spend money on fundamental research or improving the infrastructure of a country
It's "different". So what? Analogies work on things being similar not identical. Similar things are different and dissimilar things are different too. So of course, food is different from scientific research. You have to establish that the differences matter.
Here, it's still a choice. There is still a group pooling resources. Individuals still have poor incentive to cut costs or reduce inefficiencies, because a pooled effort doesn't yield significant incentives to the individual (unless there happens to be an explicit bonus or windfall for doing that). It doesn't matter if you're buying lunch, research, or infrastructure. The lack of incentives to cut costs are still there. The tragedy of the commons is still there.
I think I read in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that this is bullshit. It was, like, science.
I already explained to you why the Tragedy of the Commons does not apply.
Good, put that in a post. I think it'll end up being nonsense, but it'll be educational should you choose to listen.
The more considerable inefficiency of government
Unsaid, unproven and thus inadmissible. It is a fallacy, specifically: a loaded statement. (Technically, the opposite is starting to become apparent. In many places where privatization has been attempted costs have gone down, but simultaneously the quality of service has gone down faster, leading to a far worse ratio than when the 'inefficient' government ran that part of the sector)
Quality of service is not in isolation a measure of efficiency. After all, you noted that costs went down. As to "leading to a far worse ratio", show a case where this actually happened with a numerical metric for quality of service that isn't laughable.
Everything has the "not working properly" bit set.
No. You are the one making this black-and-white (the fallacy of the excluded middle / false dichotomy). I used logic that is much closer to reality and thus a better basis for reasoning, namely fuzzy logic: "all institutions are unreliable to some extent".
Amazing, you are still pulling this shit. Now, it's the "unreliable to some extent" bit which is set. Here's two clues as to why I keep harping on this crap. First, when you
I think that's more likely to happen than catastrophic AGW by 2100. There is this remarkable inability to show that there's a real problem from climate change despite a vast amount of effort.
Yet, on average, PhD unemployment is around 4% or so (and most of that is, I would guess, voluntary unemployment e.g. burnout). So that's really no excuse.
I'm pointing out that while it may be hard to find talented scientists, it's a problem that is solved to the point that they are being overproduced by a lot.
Oklahoma City might be called terrorism, since it had a political goal (and indeed, McVeigh even feels his goals were somewhat achieved), but McVeigh wasn't trying to scare or kill average people.
But he was targeting civilians (I gather either to target the ATF office present there or generic federal employees). That's average enough.
Global warming at this point is inevitable. Even probably 5 C warming. Some are arguing 8 C by the end of the century. However, its not the end of the world. Just a radically different one.
How about 1.5-2.5C by 2100 in exchange for giving most of the world a developed world standard of living? Sounds a good trade to me.
That is great and all. Do you realize that the entire field of mathematics is a subset of philosophy. Boolean algebra is a part of mathematics that ties in more to the other parts of philosophy. In mathematics the meaning of the equal sign is taken for granted. To be able to disprove it you have to go into philosophy.
This is not even wrong territory. You don't disprove meaning any more than you drive red.
It's also very similar to splitting up businesses much smaller than the current merger. You need a better argument here.
My view is that huge businesses are directly a result of onerous regulation. The largest businesses have the economies of scale to deal with the overhead of regulation and the resulting corruption of regulators.
Want a competitive marketplace? Make it possible for small and medium scale businesses to thrive.
Seriously, the more brains and CPUs you throw at it, the worse it'll be.
That hasn't been a problem in previous recessions nor will it be the problem in the next recession. The usual problem as in the recent real estate crisis has been leverage combined with easy money. Enough leverage and trading in government bonds becomes as risky as juggling chainsaws.
Also, it's worth noting that financial trading has a lot of cutting edge research. It beats a lot of other work you could be doing, including one-year-at-a-time college lecture positions.
To be fair to them, it's a very tough time for fundamental physics right now. Progress is insanely expensive, funding is all but non-existent, it's hard to find talented scientists who actually want to study it, and the general public just isn't interested anymore.
It's worth noting here that there is an overproduction of PhDs in all areas of theoretical physics (and not by a little bit either, I'd estimate at least a factor of two myself, due to the number of people who publish a few times and then drop off the radar), vast sums are being thrown at fundamental physics, and the general public is as interested as they get for something they'll never understand.
The existence of Yaweh or the Flying Spaghetti monster fits completely within your scientific framework. They just can't be falsified now.
They can't be falsified later either. That's the huge difference between supernatural deities and a theory that just needs more work and more technological advancement on the experimental side.