Nature doesn't care one whit about 'deserve'. We do, or we die. (eventually) There are no other options. And very likely nobody but us near enough to care one way or the other.
You're rigth, this effect is miniscule compared to the greenhouse-effect. Probably completely ignorable.
Someone ought to check my math but...
A 1GW power plant (that should be enough for the entire US) at 20% efficiency would release 5GW of heat. Compare that to the 1kW/sq meter of sunlight works out to about an area 2.2 km square. That is smaller than some clouds. Miniscule? More like below the noise level.
Uh, there's a Chaco in South America too. Maybe specifying which one, or giving the name correctly would have helped
So there is a place in South America named Chaco (I didn't know that) Not sure why you thought the South American version had any relavance (it is not a valley or canyon) but... Chaco Canyon is the more common name, valley is also used. (I've been there, valley may be a better description...)
Lots of people have used controlled burns for their own benefit. Native Americans among them. This is not 'living in harmony with nature' These practices change the forests, grasslands etc, driving out some species and introducing/encouraging others. This is no different than plows really, just not quite so destructive. Sure the forest survives, and crowds out the patches of grassland that the natural fires left.
As for the 'superior' comment, I remember a short while ago a Nova program about Roald Amundsen (first to south pole..) and his trip through the Northwest Passage. Spending the winter frozen in, he met eskimos, who taught him how to survive in the Artic. Their 'primitive' clothes were superior to his 'advanced' wool clothes, their stupid snow houses better than what he had... They knew so much that he stayed an extra year learning from them. OTOH, there is now a modern village on the spot, largely due to his stay there. They thought some of our stuff was pretty good too.
Primitive != stupid. That said, modern tech will solve most problems in less time than the more primitive people can. It is just that in some cases, they are a few centuries ahead of us.
You're talking as if we were somehow good at managing the land, but as a whole, we've never even tried.
There are some exceptions to this statement, but this is largely true. I did not mean to imply otherwise. However, this is not the result of science and tech, but corporate culture and the fact that we have only really noticed that we need to do better or we are in trouble.
The real point remains though, Native Americans (in north america, excluding central america) did not 'live in harmony with nature'. That idea is a product of european philosophy + ignorant stories by early explorers, (who knew little about how to live in harmony with nature and less about other cultures) It has almost nothing to do with reality. I tried to explain why native americans did not destroy their land in my first post.
It is Chaco Canyon, (not chaco valley) and it is in New Mexico. Think before you speak.
Pre-Columbian population figures for what is now US and Canada are somewhere between that of New York City and New York State, (possibly less, not more) Or about that of the United States in the early 1800's That is why they did not destroy much, there were simply not enough of them (and their tech was stone-age) They probably did try to take care of the land, by praying to the spirits of the animals they killed, and doing rain dances etc. Any attempt of theirs to manage the land was a crap shoot. We, with our science and technology, have a hard enough time.
...online references or books that describe natural and artificial neurons,...
Would be very nice, it may take me too long to learn the jargon of professional references, this is a personal interest of mine. I have an engineering background, not biology.
As for the pure electrical vs electro-mechanical differences, I do not see them as a big deal, because the electrical sides alone are totally different too. In the end you break the actual neuron's actions into cause/effect relationships and model those relationships. It is not like an artificial neuron in a computer 'fires' via opening and closing ion channels in a cell membrane anyway. Right?
I think it is obvious that multiple cores will be useful in this kind of research/application though. If for no other reason than they are both parallel processes.
I am aware that the continuous value output part is not correct, but all you really have to do do is send an actual 0 or 1 instead, right?
The trouble of recurrent processes in artificial networks is mostly due to the lack of loops and feedback, (most simple ones have several layers where layer 1 outputs to layer 2 etc but never 2's output never loops back to layer 1's inputs...) This would be a flaw in topology, not values/weights. As far as I can tell anyway...
The current concept of an artificial Neuron having some sort of value, with weights attributed to it is too simple for how our human brains realy work,
Could you back this up with some details? I have been looking for information about how an individual human neuron works for a while, and, while there are signifigant differences between real and simulated neurons, the value/weights thing does seem to be more or less correct.
My point is that your statement dismissing price as a reflection of economic value is simply not correct. Price is not solely a demand side concept ("what someone is willing to pay"). It is a reflection of both the willingness to pay (which, one would hope, would closely reflect the utility of the good) and the supplier's willingness to supply it. Presumably (once again), the supplier's willingness to pay reflects the value he could get from that good by putting it to its next best use. The grandparent was also wrong, but he was searching for a reasonably accurate idea whereas you simply seemed to want to rant about economists.
If you are just describing Supply and Demand curves then we are essentially in agreement here. Price and economic value are very related, just not quite the same thing, and the difference can be quite important.
Here's where I'm coming from: I work as an engineer, but I earned degrees in both engineering and economics (emphasizing mathematical modeling). I have a soft spot for economics and economists. I'm constantly amazed by the contempt with which my colleagues who use math to do "real" things view economists when they clearly don't understand the first thing about the topic. I mainly hang out on these threads because the level of crackpottery is extermely high (The Federal Reserve wants to pollute our precious bodily fluids! Bring back the yak-fur standard!). Maybe it's the typical engineering ego: "My field uses math and so does yours, but mine is harder, so that makes me a master of your field as well." I'm beginning to think that the Salem hypothesis is true, but for reasons other than its creator stated.
Seems like we both have pet peves. Mine is when people use a model of something and think of the model as reality. With Chaotic systems, (and an economy is such a system) even a good model leaves out something, and leaving out even a little something can lead to big errors. As for your pet peve, ignorance often does breed contempt, and that is not a good thing either.
A good's price in "money" may not reflect your sentimental love of your grandfather's watch, but it's a very good reflection of the watch's utility in terms of timekeeping, aesthetics, and the value of the inputs.
The market for old watches does indeed reflect peoples sentimental values, by reducing the number of watches that people are willing to sell. It is a collective measure though, and so the market price for the watch may well not match my personal sentimental value. This partly why price is such a good measure in many cases, because anything that influences a persons value judgement gets reflected into the market price - That way just about any potential use or value gets factored into the price, unlike a planned economy where it is easy to miss something.
I would argue that price is a very good measurement of the value of a warm coat and a good meal. If it weren't, I would gladly trade you a very nice meal for $10,000 in treasury bills. Price isn't a good reflection of the value of the love of your children, but if it's an asset that is scarce, rival, and useful, market prices tend to follow "value" very well for most reasonable definitions of value.
Price has some inherant limits as a measurement. For one, it is unidimentional. Everything gets boiled down to a simgle point on the number line. Within these limits price is probably as good a unidimentional measure as it is possible to have, and the best universal measure we have. That some economists seem to forget this bugs me.
I would have complained loudly over that last sentance, but you qualified it quite nicely. I would add that the degree to which the price reflects the value follows the degree to which the good is scarce, rival and useful. I do ag
'You've taken the grandparent's specific use of the word "value" in an "economic" sense and pointed out that it's not the same as the concept of "value" in the general sense, thus making economists stupid.'
No, neither I nor the GP were using the non-economic meaning of either value or price. see Wikipedia, price and value have different meanings to an economist.
'We would love to measure the actual utility of a good,...'
You have a gift for understatement. But just because we can't measure it's utility doesn't mean it has none, nor does it mean that price is the best substitute we have. Most of the reason for my post is it looked like someone was saying price isn't just a substitute for measuring value (utility is part of value) but that they were the same thing, as if there is no difference between me and how tall I am.
'You wouldn't say that a stock certificate or a government bond has "no value" because it's just a certificate and you can't eat it.'
No, I would not say that. But there are few things you can do with stocks or bonds, mostly sell them for money. This is a different kind of value than that of a warm coat or a good meal. Price does a very poor job of capturing those differences.
'...but until you can give me a number for the value of water, I'll be working with prices.'
If you simplify an economy down to just a bunch of numbers and math equations, you have simplified out most of it's reality. I will not claim that this is useless, but if you start thinking of those numbers and equations as the economy, and not a gross simplification - you are wrong, and you are going to make big mistakes with almost any predictions you make. If for some reason you need a number for the value of water, it's price is a reasonable place to start. Once you start thinking that the value of water is it's price, you have gone off the deep end. In economics, unlike math, the numbers aren't real - they are just convenient and imperfect models for reality.
'Yes, and diamonds are practically worthless save some industrial uses and jewelry. There's no reason for them to have a higher price than steel, which is good for all sorts of stuff.'
Repeat after me - value!=price, value!=price. Sometimes they have almost nothing in common - like for diamonds, or clean air. Why you think I am unaware of or disagree with the explainations economists have for this seems to have gotten lost in translation.
'Which is why I said, "In the economic" sense. Which means, "pertaining to the field of economics, which is the study of distribution of scarce resources."'
And I replied 'in the economic sense'. Go look at the wikipedia article on economics. There are different sections on value and price - precicely because in economics, they are different concepts. In fact, in the price section there is this statement 'Another area of economic controversy is about whether price measures the value of a good correctly.' This is precicely what my post was addressing.
'Sure things have other "value" besides economic, but as far as the economy (the interaction between *multiple* people exchanging goods and services) is concerned, there is no value besides what someone else is willing to pay for something.' No. All values that have any relavance to people are economic values - because people are the ones exchanging goods and services. In a perfect market, with perfectly informed people, the price of item is an accurate measure of the total value of that item. Saying that price == value is like saying a $20 bill is the same as a tank of gas. If you try to measure their value in dollars it is the same number, but only one makes the car go.
'And this perception [that they can sell for more money later] leads them to pay more for something, increasing its economic value. There is no "right price" for a house.'
There is a lot of truth in the phrase 'there is no right price'. If someone claims to be able to calculate the 'right price', they are almost certainly wrong. And those things you mentioned that have affected house prices in the last 50 years are relavant too. If there is a 'right price' for a house, it changes over time, even if you take out speculative effects. The intrinsic value[1] of the house however does not change. (ignoring wearing out, etc.) It is tempting here to define 'actual value' as some sum of intrinsic and extrinsic values, with some other fudge factors like the differences between percieved market prices and actual prices etc, but then I would fall into the trap of thinking of actual value as a number with some fixed relationship to price. It isn't. That doesn't mean that it does not exist - it just means that it is difficult to work with.
'We'd have to consider the sentimental value that you place on things if economics were a study of your personal preferences and emotions. ..but it's not.'
Value judgements are at the heart of economic activity. People make these judgements. Almost everyone lets their emotions affect their value judgements, and everyone takes their personal preferences into account. Any study of economics without accounting for collective preferences and emotions is badly flawed. For one you cannot account for bubbles, manias, boom and bust cycles, and a whole bunch of other observed economic actions. Economics most certainly includes a study of personal preferences and emotions, just not *mine* in particular.
An AC replyed to my post as well as you - he had some good things to say. Take a look.
T
[1]total value, which price attempts to measure, minus extrinsic value - any value related to a transfer of ownership [sale, mortgage etc.] - my definitions here.
'When talking about economics, there's no such thing as "actual value."'
It is economic idiocy like this that has put us into the trouble that we are now in. Value, in economic sense, is not determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That is 'price', a very different thing.
Price is what you pay to get it, Value is what you can do with it. You seem to understand this in your last statement. Since the only thing that you can (legally) do with a penny is buy something, it's value is its price by definition. The value of the things you can do with the zinc is greater than the penny, and the greater price of the zinc vs. the penny is partly the result of this. Part of the price of the zinc is how much money people (speculators) expect to be able to buy with the zinc later on.
The same thing is happening with houses. Far to much of the price of houses today is due not to the value of a house (what you can do with a house, live in it) but instead due to how much people think that they can sell the house for later.
The value of water is the same in Canada and the Sahara - there is almost no difference in what you can do with it there. - The price is different.
The value of clean air is the same almost everywhere, - it keeps you alive - The price is zero in most places on earth.
Economics is not a branch of mathematics, but most economists seem to think it is. Price is easy to measure with numbers, math is easy with numbers. Value is not easy (is it possible?) to measure with numbers. In math there is no such thing a not-a-number. Actual value is not a number, so econo-mathists tend to think that actual value does not exist.
I never said a law was more likely to be repealed than not repealed, I said it was more likely for a new law to be passed than an old law repealed. 30 is less than 55.
Sorry, I do not live in a hypothetical world. I live in the real one. Hypothetical examples are great tools of logic, but they make poor observational tools. It is easy to come up with possible cases where bad things do not happen. I am talking about how likely those are vs. cases where bad things do happen. Probability, not possibility. Secondly, even in your hypothetical example, 55 laws were passed, and 30 repealed. Your argument would have been perfect, except that it fails second grade math, and the fact that it requires that there are no old laws around. This is obviously not the case.
Does it 'necessarily indicate'? No, it strongly suggests, and is a necessary precondition for.
"The fact that there are a some laws left over from bygone eras does not in any sense support the assertion that restrictive laws are unlikely to be repealed."
Absolutly false, in a strictly logical sense. Again, it suggests, and is a necessary precondition for the repeal of restrictive laws to be unlikely. It would take a careful statistical analysis to show that these are indeed simply leftovers. Most possible distributions of laws still on the books (distribution of the dates they were passed) would indeed support the assertion that laws are less likely to be repealed than passed.
More bluntly, from wikepedia "The first edition of the Code was contained in a single bound volume; today, it spans several large volumes. " The only way to get more laws now than in the past is for more to be passed than repealed. Your hypothetical example of all old laws being repealed and more new ones passed is worthless, as that does not happen in the real world.[1]
To your lottery example, the fact that somebody somewhere won a lottery is not proof that I am likely to win, but (assuming that the rules of the current lottery are the same as that previous one) it does prove that it is possible for me to win, and it does support (if weakly) the assertion that I will win. If nobody had ever won, that would not prove that I can't win, but it would strongly suggest that I can't.
"In addition is seems that we might be in danger of incongruity. Just because Congress makes a new law, does not mean that this law has anything to do with the restricting of historical freedoms and therefore doesn't really impact the matter in question.
Closer, but still no. If you change 'doesn't really' to 'may not, depending on the details' then you would have been correct. Those details of course being the effects of existing restrictive laws on the rates of new restrictive laws being passed - Which is the whole point in question in the first place. The fact that Congress passes more laws than it repeals eliminates one possible mechanism that would prevent sliding down the slippery slope, specifically your assertion that laws are repealed as fast as they are passed, therefore an accumulation of restrictive laws is unlikely.
"Once again, you have made an assertion that is unsupported in any way."
'I think' , 'seem to'. Those phrases do not occur in assertions, therefore that was not an assertion. It was an observation, one that I knew could easily be wrong and by using those phrases I let any reader (except - apparently - you[2]) know that too. And the support is in you own posts, up for all to see and come to their own conclusions. What I see in you is a reasonably firm understanding of logic, and vast ignorance of just about everything else we have discussed. (history, political science, math, statistics, laws, and human nature)
[1] Ok, now this is an assertion. I said it 'does not happen' not 'seems to not happen' And yes, I provided no factual or logical support for it. This is a/. post, not a PhD thesis. I don't have room to include it, nor time to collect and present it, I've wasted enough time on this already. Besides, only someone who is totally ignorant of the history of human government can't find a fair bit of support off the top of their heads anyway.
"since it is theoretically just as easy to repeal a law as to enact a new one that goes further in the same direction"
This is theoretically correct. 'In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they are not'
In the end, however, I was not talking about how easy or hard it is to repeal restrictive laws. In practice that does not matter. What matters is how likely is it that the restrictive law gets repealed vs. a more restrictive law passed. Simply considering the number of laws on the books, it is clear that passing new laws is more likely than repealing old ones. Here is some evidence to back that up. And those are just the funny ones.
I think that the largest trouble with the slippery slope argument is that the slope is usually not slippery, or much of a slope, as you said. However, every so often some power-hungry nut-job gets into power, and then the slope is usually steep and slick.
It *is* a good device to communicate an idea, and it may even turn out to be correct, but it has no more place in classical logic than anecdotal evidence or appeal to emotion.
Now I think we are getting close to the heart of our differences. You seem to care more that your logic is correct than that your conclusions are correct. I am the opposite. Even an idiot is occasionally correct, even if by nothing more than sheer dumb luck, and almost always in spite of correct logic, not because of it. With that understanding I can partly agree with you. The 'slippery slope' is not a very logically sound argument. This fact does not however, have all that much to do with whether it is correct.
From the example in the provided link: (emphasis added)
"If we pass laws against fully-automatic weapons, then it won't be long before we pass laws on all weapons, and then we will begin to restrict other rights, and finally we will end up living in a communist state. Thus, we should not ban fully-automatic weapons."
This is obviously a logical fallacy - laws against automatic weapons do not all by themselves make a communist state inevitable. The thing is though, that this is not what most people mean when they use the term 'slippery slope'. Here is a better example of what is meant.
"If we pass laws against fully-automatic weapons, then the existance and acceptance of those laws make it easier to pass laws banning on all weapons. Acceptance of laws against all weapons make it easier to restrict other rights, and finally we may very well end up living in a communist state. Thus, we should not ban fully-automatic weapons."
This is not a logical fallacy - it is human nature. Once you start down the slope it is easier to move farther down than it is to climb back up - and you do not want to end up at the bottom! The only reason what you said wasn't totally offtopic was the fact that the OP did what most people do when they are trying to convince others - he overstated his case. 'Very well may' is not as nice sounding as 'must surely be', and so he chose the latter.
In short, the logical fallacy of the 'slippery slope' is a strawman - it disproves something other than the original (correctly worded) argument.
"It's interesting that that you mentioned the "slippery slope," since this is a well-known logical fallacy."
The fallacy is, 'Since they require ID to board airplanes, they will require it to cross state lines, hotels etc... in the (near) future'
This is obviously not true. However, that is not what the term 'slippery slope' means. It means that 'they' want to require ID for everything, but the people won't let 'them' start that all at once. So 'they' start with one thing, the people get used to it, and allow the next, and the next and...
This is not a fallacy. It is human nature. It is only inevitable if 'they' exist, and the people don't hold to their principals. Now if you can prove that one of those is not the case, then we have nothing to worry about...
Slashdot Mirror
Nature doesn't care one whit about 'deserve'. We do, or we die. (eventually) There are no other options. And very likely nobody but us near enough to care one way or the other.
T
EErrkk. Total US electricity use is more like 400GW. More like 45 km square total area.
T
A 1GW power plant (that should be enough for the entire US) at 20% efficiency would release 5GW of heat. Compare that to the 1kW/sq meter of sunlight works out to about an area 2.2 km square. That is smaller than some clouds. Miniscule? More like below the noise level.
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So there is a place in South America named Chaco (I didn't know that) Not sure why you thought the South American version had any relavance (it is not a valley or canyon) but... Chaco Canyon is the more common name, valley is also used. (I've been there, valley may be a better description...)
Lots of people have used controlled burns for their own benefit. Native Americans among them. This is not 'living in harmony with nature' These practices change the forests, grasslands etc, driving out some species and introducing/encouraging others. This is no different than plows really, just not quite so destructive. Sure the forest survives, and crowds out the patches of grassland that the natural fires left.
As for the 'superior' comment, I remember a short while ago a Nova program about Roald Amundsen (first to south pole..) and his trip through the Northwest Passage. Spending the winter frozen in, he met eskimos, who taught him how to survive in the Artic. Their 'primitive' clothes were superior to his 'advanced' wool clothes, their stupid snow houses better than what he had... They knew so much that he stayed an extra year learning from them. OTOH, there is now a modern village on the spot, largely due to his stay there. They thought some of our stuff was pretty good too.
Primitive != stupid. That said, modern tech will solve most problems in less time than the more primitive people can. It is just that in some cases, they are a few centuries ahead of us.
There are some exceptions to this statement, but this is largely true. I did not mean to imply otherwise. However, this is not the result of science and tech, but corporate culture and the fact that we have only really noticed that we need to do better or we are in trouble.
The real point remains though, Native Americans (in north america, excluding central america) did not 'live in harmony with nature'. That idea is a product of european philosophy + ignorant stories by early explorers, (who knew little about how to live in harmony with nature and less about other cultures) It has almost nothing to do with reality. I tried to explain why native americans did not destroy their land in my first post.
T
It is Chaco Canyon, (not chaco valley) and it is in New Mexico. Think before you speak.
Pre-Columbian population figures for what is now US and Canada are somewhere between that of New York City and New York State, (possibly less, not more) Or about that of the United States in the early 1800's That is why they did not destroy much, there were simply not enough of them (and their tech was stone-age) They probably did try to take care of the land, by praying to the spirits of the animals they killed, and doing rain dances etc. Any attempt of theirs to manage the land was a crap shoot. We, with our science and technology, have a hard enough time.
T
Would be very nice, it may take me too long to learn the jargon of professional references, this is a personal interest of mine. I have an engineering background, not biology.
As for the pure electrical vs electro-mechanical differences, I do not see them as a big deal, because the electrical sides alone are totally different too. In the end you break the actual neuron's actions into cause/effect relationships and model those relationships. It is not like an artificial neuron in a computer 'fires' via opening and closing ion channels in a cell membrane anyway. Right?
I think it is obvious that multiple cores will be useful in this kind of research/application though. If for no other reason than they are both parallel processes.
T
I am aware that the continuous value output part is not correct, but all you really have to do do is send an actual 0 or 1 instead, right?
The trouble of recurrent processes in artificial networks is mostly due to the lack of loops and feedback, (most simple ones have several layers where layer 1 outputs to layer 2 etc but never 2's output never loops back to layer 1's inputs...) This would be a flaw in topology, not values/weights. As far as I can tell anyway...
T
Could you back this up with some details? I have been looking for information about how an individual human neuron works for a while, and, while there are signifigant differences between real and simulated neurons, the value/weights thing does seem to be more or less correct.
T
If you are just describing Supply and Demand curves then we are essentially in agreement here. Price and economic value are very related, just not quite the same thing, and the difference can be quite important.
Seems like we both have pet peves. Mine is when people use a model of something and think of the model as reality. With Chaotic systems, (and an economy is such a system) even a good model leaves out something, and leaving out even a little something can lead to big errors. As for your pet peve, ignorance often does breed contempt, and that is not a good thing either.
The market for old watches does indeed reflect peoples sentimental values, by reducing the number of watches that people are willing to sell. It is a collective measure though, and so the market price for the watch may well not match my personal sentimental value. This partly why price is such a good measure in many cases, because anything that influences a persons value judgement gets reflected into the market price - That way just about any potential use or value gets factored into the price, unlike a planned economy where it is easy to miss something.
Price has some inherant limits as a measurement. For one, it is unidimentional. Everything gets boiled down to a simgle point on the number line. Within these limits price is probably as good a unidimentional measure as it is possible to have, and the best universal measure we have. That some economists seem to forget this bugs me.
I would have complained loudly over that last sentance, but you qualified it quite nicely. I would add that the degree to which the price reflects the value follows the degree to which the good is scarce, rival and useful. I do ag
'You've taken the grandparent's specific use of the word "value" in an "economic" sense and pointed out that it's not the same as the concept of "value" in the general sense, thus making economists stupid.'
No, neither I nor the GP were using the non-economic meaning of either value or price. see Wikipedia, price and value have different meanings to an economist.
'We would love to measure the actual utility of a good, ...'
You have a gift for understatement. But just because we can't measure it's utility doesn't mean it has none, nor does it mean that price is the best substitute we have. Most of the reason for my post is it looked like someone was saying price isn't just a substitute for measuring value (utility is part of value) but that they were the same thing, as if there is no difference between me and how tall I am.
'You wouldn't say that a stock certificate or a government bond has "no value" because it's just a certificate and you can't eat it.'
No, I would not say that. But there are few things you can do with stocks or bonds, mostly sell them for money. This is a different kind of value than that of a warm coat or a good meal. Price does a very poor job of capturing those differences.
'...but until you can give me a number for the value of water, I'll be working with prices.'
If you simplify an economy down to just a bunch of numbers and math equations, you have simplified out most of it's reality. I will not claim that this is useless, but if you start thinking of those numbers and equations as the economy, and not a gross simplification - you are wrong, and you are going to make big mistakes with almost any predictions you make. If for some reason you need a number for the value of water, it's price is a reasonable place to start. Once you start thinking that the value of water is it's price, you have gone off the deep end. In economics, unlike math, the numbers aren't real - they are just convenient and imperfect models for reality.
'Yes, and diamonds are practically worthless save some industrial uses and jewelry. There's no reason for them to have a higher price than steel, which is good for all sorts of stuff.'
Repeat after me - value!=price, value!=price. Sometimes they have almost nothing in common - like for diamonds, or clean air. Why you think I am unaware of or disagree with the explainations economists have for this seems to have gotten lost in translation.
T
'Which is why I said, "In the economic" sense. Which means, "pertaining to the field of economics, which is the study of distribution of scarce resources."'
And I replied 'in the economic sense'. Go look at the wikipedia article on economics. There are different sections on value and price - precicely because in economics, they are different concepts. In fact, in the price section there is this statement 'Another area of economic controversy is about whether price measures the value of a good correctly.' This is precicely what my post was addressing.
'Sure things have other "value" besides economic, but as far as the economy (the interaction between *multiple* people exchanging goods and services) is concerned, there is no value besides what someone else is willing to pay for something.' No. All values that have any relavance to people are economic values - because people are the ones exchanging goods and services. In a perfect market, with perfectly informed people, the price of item is an accurate measure of the total value of that item. Saying that price == value is like saying a $20 bill is the same as a tank of gas. If you try to measure their value in dollars it is the same number, but only one makes the car go.
'And this perception [that they can sell for more money later] leads them to pay more for something, increasing its economic value. There is no "right price" for a house.'
There is a lot of truth in the phrase 'there is no right price'. If someone claims to be able to calculate the 'right price', they are almost certainly wrong. And those things you mentioned that have affected house prices in the last 50 years are relavant too. If there is a 'right price' for a house, it changes over time, even if you take out speculative effects. The intrinsic value[1] of the house however does not change. (ignoring wearing out, etc.) It is tempting here to define 'actual value' as some sum of intrinsic and extrinsic values, with some other fudge factors like the differences between percieved market prices and actual prices etc, but then I would fall into the trap of thinking of actual value as a number with some fixed relationship to price. It isn't. That doesn't mean that it does not exist - it just means that it is difficult to work with.
'We'd have to consider the sentimental value that you place on things if economics were a study of your personal preferences and emotions. . .but it's not.'
Value judgements are at the heart of economic activity. People make these judgements. Almost everyone lets their emotions affect their value judgements, and everyone takes their personal preferences into account. Any study of economics without accounting for collective preferences and emotions is badly flawed. For one you cannot account for bubbles, manias, boom and bust cycles, and a whole bunch of other observed economic actions. Economics most certainly includes a study of personal preferences and emotions, just not *mine* in particular.
An AC replyed to my post as well as you - he had some good things to say. Take a look.
T
[1]total value, which price attempts to measure, minus extrinsic value - any value related to a transfer of ownership [sale, mortgage etc.] - my definitions here.
'When talking about economics, there's no such thing as "actual value."'
It is economic idiocy like this that has put us into the trouble that we are now in. Value, in economic sense, is not determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. That is 'price', a very different thing.
Price is what you pay to get it, Value is what you can do with it. You seem to understand this in your last statement. Since the only thing that you can (legally) do with a penny is buy something, it's value is its price by definition. The value of the things you can do with the zinc is greater than the penny, and the greater price of the zinc vs. the penny is partly the result of this. Part of the price of the zinc is how much money people (speculators) expect to be able to buy with the zinc later on.
The same thing is happening with houses. Far to much of the price of houses today is due not to the value of a house (what you can do with a house, live in it) but instead due to how much people think that they can sell the house for later.
The value of water is the same in Canada and the Sahara - there is almost no difference in what you can do with it there. - The price is different.
The value of clean air is the same almost everywhere, - it keeps you alive - The price is zero in most places on earth.
Economics is not a branch of mathematics, but most economists seem to think it is. Price is easy to measure with numbers, math is easy with numbers. Value is not easy (is it possible?) to measure with numbers. In math there is no such thing a not-a-number. Actual value is not a number, so econo-mathists tend to think that actual value does not exist.
T
I bet zinc wouldn't look all that different. Coat it with copper just like we have been.
Extreme liberals call for no deaths for anyone at all under any circumstances no matter what the cost.
(Costs like mandating seat belts and strictly enforcing the food pyramid)
T
I never said a law was more likely to be repealed than not repealed, I said it was more likely for a new law to be passed than an old law repealed. 30 is less than 55.
Rain, hail, and cold.
They can't afford the car and you expect them to buy a scooter too? (ever try to fit a family of four on a scooter?)
Sorry, I do not live in a hypothetical world. I live in the real one. Hypothetical examples are great tools of logic, but they make poor observational tools. It is easy to come up with possible cases where bad things do not happen. I am talking about how likely those are vs. cases where bad things do happen. Probability, not possibility. Secondly, even in your hypothetical example, 55 laws were passed, and 30 repealed. Your argument would have been perfect, except that it fails second grade math, and the fact that it requires that there are no old laws around. This is obviously not the case.
Does it 'necessarily indicate'? No, it strongly suggests, and is a necessary precondition for.
"The fact that there are a some laws left over from bygone eras does not in any sense support the assertion that restrictive laws are unlikely to be repealed."
Absolutly false, in a strictly logical sense. Again, it suggests, and is a necessary precondition for the repeal of restrictive laws to be unlikely. It would take a careful statistical analysis to show that these are indeed simply leftovers. Most possible distributions of laws still on the books (distribution of the dates they were passed) would indeed support the assertion that laws are less likely to be repealed than passed.
More bluntly, from wikepedia "The first edition of the Code was contained in a single bound volume; today, it spans several large volumes. " The only way to get more laws now than in the past is for more to be passed than repealed. Your hypothetical example of all old laws being repealed and more new ones passed is worthless, as that does not happen in the real world.[1]
To your lottery example, the fact that somebody somewhere won a lottery is not proof that I am likely to win, but (assuming that the rules of the current lottery are the same as that previous one) it does prove that it is possible for me to win, and it does support (if weakly) the assertion that I will win. If nobody had ever won, that would not prove that I can't win, but it would strongly suggest that I can't.
"In addition is seems that we might be in danger of incongruity. Just because Congress makes a new law, does not mean that this law has anything to do with the restricting of historical freedoms and therefore doesn't really impact the matter in question.
Closer, but still no. If you change 'doesn't really' to 'may not, depending on the details' then you would have been correct. Those details of course being the effects of existing restrictive laws on the rates of new restrictive laws being passed - Which is the whole point in question in the first place. The fact that Congress passes more laws than it repeals eliminates one possible mechanism that would prevent sliding down the slippery slope, specifically your assertion that laws are repealed as fast as they are passed, therefore an accumulation of restrictive laws is unlikely.
"Once again, you have made an assertion that is unsupported in any way."
'I think' , 'seem to'. Those phrases do not occur in assertions, therefore that was not an assertion. It was an observation, one that I knew could easily be wrong and by using those phrases I let any reader (except - apparently - you[2]) know that too. And the support is in you own posts, up for all to see and come to their own conclusions. What I see in you is a reasonably firm understanding of logic, and vast ignorance of just about everything else we have discussed. (history, political science, math, statistics, laws, and human nature)
[1] Ok, now this is an assertion. I said it 'does not happen' not 'seems to not happen' And yes, I provided no factual or logical support for it. This is a /. post, not a PhD thesis. I don't have room to include it, nor time to collect and present it, I've wasted enough time on this already. Besides, only someone who is totally ignorant of the history of human government can't find a fair bit of support off the top of their heads anyway.
[2]not an assertion.
T
"since it is theoretically just as easy to repeal a law as to enact a new one that goes further in the same direction"
This is theoretically correct. 'In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they are not'
In the end, however, I was not talking about how easy or hard it is to repeal restrictive laws. In practice that does not matter. What matters is how likely is it that the restrictive law gets repealed vs. a more restrictive law passed. Simply considering the number of laws on the books, it is clear that passing new laws is more likely than repealing old ones. Here is some evidence to back that up. And those are just the funny ones.
I think that the largest trouble with the slippery slope argument is that the slope is usually not slippery, or much of a slope, as you said. However, every so often some power-hungry nut-job gets into power, and then the slope is usually steep and slick.
It *is* a good device to communicate an idea, and it may even turn out to be correct, but it has no more place in classical logic than anecdotal evidence or appeal to emotion.
Now I think we are getting close to the heart of our differences. You seem to care more that your logic is correct than that your conclusions are correct. I am the opposite. Even an idiot is occasionally correct, even if by nothing more than sheer dumb luck, and almost always in spite of correct logic, not because of it. With that understanding I can partly agree with you. The 'slippery slope' is not a very logically sound argument. This fact does not however, have all that much to do with whether it is correct.
Your 'real' world is a strange beast then, if it does not include people who just want to learn. You can't even see the rut you are in.
And those who want to know stuff for some reason other than getting paid. Not all of us are in your mental rut.
It may just be me, but, I don't think I want that kind of 'luck'. T
From the example in the provided link: (emphasis added)
"If we pass laws against fully-automatic weapons, then it won't be long before we pass laws on all weapons, and then we will begin to restrict other rights, and finally we will end up living in a communist state. Thus, we should not ban fully-automatic weapons."
This is obviously a logical fallacy - laws against automatic weapons do not all by themselves make a communist state inevitable. The thing is though, that this is not what most people mean when they use the term 'slippery slope'. Here is a better example of what is meant.
"If we pass laws against fully-automatic weapons, then the existance and acceptance of those laws make it easier to pass laws banning on all weapons. Acceptance of laws against all weapons make it easier to restrict other rights, and finally we may very well end up living in a communist state. Thus, we should not ban fully-automatic weapons."
This is not a logical fallacy - it is human nature. Once you start down the slope it is easier to move farther down than it is to climb back up - and you do not want to end up at the bottom! The only reason what you said wasn't totally offtopic was the fact that the OP did what most people do when they are trying to convince others - he overstated his case. 'Very well may' is not as nice sounding as 'must surely be', and so he chose the latter.
In short, the logical fallacy of the 'slippery slope' is a strawman - it disproves something other than the original (correctly worded) argument.
"It's interesting that that you mentioned the "slippery slope," since this is a well-known logical fallacy."
The fallacy is, 'Since they require ID to board airplanes, they will require it to cross state lines, hotels etc... in the (near) future'
This is obviously not true. However, that is not what the term 'slippery slope' means. It means that 'they' want to require ID for everything, but the people won't let 'them' start that all at once. So 'they' start with one thing, the people get used to it, and allow the next, and the next and...
This is not a fallacy. It is human nature. It is only inevitable if 'they' exist, and the people don't hold to their principals. Now if you can prove that one of those is not the case, then we have nothing to worry about...
Sweet idea! A $500 reward for hacking a website and leaving no incriminating evidence.