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DavidOdden

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  1. It seems to me that the most that one can reasonably do is scrutinize the logic of Sapolsky’s challenge: “What is needed to prove free will: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by preceding factors”. This is a common fallacy of rationalism, which can only be countered by a counter-challenge. My counter-challenge is “What is needed to prove determinism is: show me your ability to predict the choices made by men”. (Cognitive) determinism is an unfalsifiable pseudo-axiom. What constitutes a proof is not metaphysically given and is not self-evident. A proof is a presentation of evidence and the disposition of counterevidence. Sapolsky does not get to stipulate what constitutes proof, that is an objective question of logic (does all of th evidence support the claim? That is what a proof is). Ordinary observation of humans refutes the premise that all choices are predetermined. To refute that refutation of determinism, it is insufficient to cry out wittily “You were predestined to make that argument”, one (Sapolsky) has to provide an actual model of the universe from which we can compute any man’s choices, and one must provide at least a modicum of experimental evidence to support the correctness of that model of the human mind. Needless to say, nobody has come within a light year of that gauntlet, much less ever having picked it up. The underlying logical premise is based on the law of non-contradiction, which says that being whipped and burned is not the same as not being whipped and burned. The universe exists in a definite non-contradictory state. Alas, certain philosophico-scientists conflate epistemology and metaphysics, believing that if one cannot know whether X is the case or denial of X is the case, then the universe itself has an indeterminate state. More traditionally, existence is binary but knowledge is ternary (or more): we have “true”, “false” and “I don’t know”, but the fact either exist, or it doesn’t. The Sapolsky-style argument is based on flawed burden-of-proof reasoning, that he who makes the claim must prove the claim. I direct your attention to vast amounts of evidence for free will, but the Sapolsky-style argument rejects the evidence because a particular statement is offered as axiomatic, when in fact it is not an axiom. The burden of proof now rests on Sapolsky or his followers and predecessors to provide a model which predicts human choices at the level that ordinary science would hold to “disprove the null hypothesis” (the .05 level, which AFAIK is actually unacceptably lax in physics which I understand requires 99.7% CL to be “evidence” and 99.9999% CL to be “discovery”). Up until 2001, there was no explicit physical model of the fact that bumblebees fly, but nobody seriously doubted that they do. Likewise, there should be no serious doubt that humans have free will, even if we can’t reduce it to an equation rooted in sub-atomic physics.
  2. As far as I understand, a person is not to sacrifice himself to another person sua sponte, he is supposed to sacrifice himself to God. Of course one may believe that what God wants you to do is die so that some other people may live, or perhaps to live and kill those who oppose him, for the greater glory of God. Since God doesn’t have a Twitter account, it’s anyone’s guess what God really wants you to do. Knowledge is hierarchical, including moral knowledge. For the Christian, God is the highest value and all is to be sacrificed for his sake. Self is to be be sacrificed only when commanded by a higher value – God.
  3. I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details. The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.
  4. Even though I’m a native speaker of English, there are tons of expressions which I don’t really understand, like “gaslight” or “run the table”, which I only have a vague idea about the meaning. Best I can tell, “run the table” means “dominates” or “accounts for a majority of”. If that’s what you mean, it certainly seems to be true that most posts here are Gus’s rebloggings. Which then raises another question: why has this befallen OO? Not the fact that Gus produces a daily blog, but that there is very little else happening here. And, incidentally, anywhere else. Something has changed, but what?
  5. We have some concrete national averages of total commissions from three sources that bother to give concrete numbers: 5.49%, 5.8%, 5.57%, which averages out to 5.62%. The usual ballpark cited is “between 5%-6%”, which sort of meshes with the actually-computed means. If this government intervention is actually effective in reducing net commission paid, we expect that in a year, the average rate should be about 0.5% lower (or more). I will set myself a reminder to come back here in about a year to see if commissions went down as a consequence of this antitrust action. The leftist Brookings Institute promulgates the observation that “steering” contributes to high commission rates, as well as higher prices. Seller publishes the commission split on MLS, information that is available only to agents, not to customers or non-agent real estate professionals. Buyer’s agents also have an incentive to steer customers away from low-commission deals, consequently sale prices on low-commission properties is lower. They had been able to get away with this because MLS was private unregulated property, thus the rule that MLS information is members-only. Following an earlier antitrust case MLS became more of a “common carrier”, though that action did not seem to have ameliorates the commission "problem". NAR still recommends commission percentages, and apparently that practice is the target of the current legal action, one example here where part of the relief sought was permanently “enjoining Defendants from continuing to require sellers to pay the buyer broker and from continuing to restrict competition among buyer brokers”, and the current settlement purportedly requires NAR to get rid of the Participation Rule, which is part of the license to use the service.
  6. I don’t know what would be rightfully low if it is forced. Rates are regulated in a number of countries (Austria, Greece, Slovenia, France, UAE and Italy under municipal ordinance). A major difference across countries is whether sellers pay the commission (the majority practice e.g. US, Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Montenegro, Latvia, France), rarely buyers (UAE, Slovenia – most of the commission), or shared (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Germany in some cases otherwise shouldered by the buyer). Real estate brokers are generally government licensed as in the US, the UK situation being exceptional. Reports of average total commission are highly variable (the number is set by a state commission in Germany, by the local chamber of commerce in Italy). In fact, Americans do not pay 6% except in Alaska, West Virginia, Wyoming, but also the lowest state average in the US is around 4.9 in Utah. US is certainly on the high end for civilized countries, but France is even higher. I would certainly like to blame the government for everything, but I just don’t see the evidence that that is correct in this case. Agents are typically licensed by law, licensed agents are not required to be members of NAR in the US, regulated rates can be high (France) or low (UAE). There does seem to be a relation between low rate and whether the burden is not entirely on the seller.
  7. It is analogous to the fees imposed on vendors who accept credit cards. Credit card companies charge vendors some amount for their service, which the market has set at about 3% but some companies charge more (hence “we don’t accept Discover or American Express”). In this case, the business can either eat the cost, or refuse to accept credit cards, or charge mor for using a credit card (if legal, otherwise they offer a discount for cash). NAR has the power to enforce terms on members using their services, and 3% per party is fairly standard (was so when we bought our first house in 1987). An agent has the greatest incentive to sell a house that they are the seller’s agent, so as a buyer you can assume that you will probably get shown many houses being sold by your agent: but not exclusively. MLS is the useful tool by which agents gain access to many more houses and buyers. Originally, there was little alternative to paying the “standard rate”, when all agents agree to abide by a certain fee standard. The rates have never been fully-enforceable so the NYT is just lying, no surprise. An agent can elect to forego some of their commission, if they want, but Agent A cannot force Agent B to accept a lower commission. I’ve heard of agents accepting a lower commission but it seems to be rare. Of course there was always “for sale by owner”, where there is a chance that you will sell your house for a good price. The interwebs provided some competition, and there are services which aim to match buyers and sellers for a lower commission. The FTC approach is to force multiple listing services to become public utilities, preventing them from not including discount sales in their listing. Outside of real estate, 3% is a ludicrously low sales commission given the agent's labor, so whiners who object to paying for the service provided by a real estate agent are free to arrange cheaper alternatives. Doing without an agent is an obvious albeit hard-to-implement choice. Shopping for a discount listing service is another choice, depending of course on the nature of the market you are in (i.e. do you need a shark, to make sure that you make the winning bid?). But real estate commissions are not "so high". Government excise taxes on the other hand...
  8. The next step in the analysis is to determine in what way children should be protected from harm (removing the question of the role of government), which therefore means identifying what is harmful to children. Many things are harmful to children, in my opinion. Causing a child to hold false beliefs is harmful, for example, causing them to believe that they are sacrificial animals meant to serve the greater good is harmful, believing in God or other supernatural entities or mystical supposedly axiomatic forces like “climate change” is harmful, causing a child to believe that good is arbitrary and subjective or that it is what is mandated by God (according to whomever) is also harmful. Raising a child so that they will believe that others will take care of them is harmful, similarly not raising a child so that they become independent self-propelling beings is harmful. It is harmful to cause a child to believe that heroin, meth, amphetamines and so on are harmless aids to spiritual development, it is also harmful to enable a child to inflict self harm (supplying them with dangerous materials such as tobacco, drugs or alcohol, also firearms or power tools when not paired with appropriate training). This is just a sample of harmful things, by no means an exhaustive list. Man is not born with a hard-wired moral code, such a code must be learned, and it is primarily the responsibility of the parent to provide a moral code to their child. Of course the child must choose to accept the code which is offered, or to develop their own moral code (ultimately though the choice of higher-level moral codes which rely on more perceptual principle such as “don’t kill yourself!”, “don’t steal!”, “don’t lie!”). The responsibility of the parent is to make an earnest effort to import a proper moral code to the child, and irresponsibility is defined on the basis of a lack of effort, not a lack of success. This is a very thin and under-specified framework for defining the idea of “protecting a child”. Still casting aside the question of proper or constitutional law and the role of government as a means of protecting rights, if a society cannot say what end it is trying to reach and only relies on meaningless slogans like “protect the children!”, I see no hope for bridging the logical gap between that desired end and the proper means of reaching the end. There is an underlying historical / documentary challenge coming from this specific law. Social media has abundant unsupported assertions as to why this law was passed, but those analyses lack concrete evidence. Can anyone locate floor debates or committee reports, or even notes from legislative aids, surrounding the enactment of this law which provides evidence as to the state of mind of the legislators who voted for (or against) this bill? I have searched for any such evidence on the Utah legislature website, to no avail. This is not entirely surprising, since overt discussion of real issues is typically lacking in the official legislative process (discussion of content needs to be via unofficial channels, in order to circumvent the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act – if there’s no record of discussion, there’s no hope of revealing the underlying truth about a particular law). It is not insane to think that most legislators hate social media platforms for being so blatantly leftist in their policies, that is both a standard right-wing meme and an observable fact. However, there isn’t a shred of concrete evidence that this fact caused the majority to vote yes on the bill.
  9. Do you think that parents (or other legal guardians) should be held legally responsible for harm that befalls a child because of lack of parental supervision, including foreseeably bad choices? Or should parents be free from the consequences of their inaction, when action (restriction) is warranted?
  10. So do you argue that the age of legal adulthood should be 8, including e.g. the obligation to fulfill contract, provide for your own survival, have sex etc?
  11. There is a recurring problem – here and elsewhere – of asserting an underlying reasoning behind government actions. Whether those supposed reasons are offered by the right or the left, there is never any concrete proof that those are the reasons. Indeed, there is never any discussion of the actual mental state of the legislators or regulators, much less evidence of that mental state. Instead, the analysts will pick up some phrase uttered by some person and say “That is why we have this law”. Poppycock! The real reason why such laws come into existence (and this should be so self-evident that no proof is needed, I admit that this is a lazy argument) is that each law-maker creates a mental image of the political consequences of supporting or opposing any law. This particular law is “about protecting children”, no sane politician would oppose protecting children, end of story. But the real issue is very complicated, and Gus fails to give the issue the scrutiny that it deserves – who has what right? Let’s start with the question of what rights children have: do they have the same rights as adults? For example, can a 10 year old rightfully have sex with an adult, consent to surgery, or form contracts and be sued for breach? If not, why not? Under current law, the answer is no they cannot, because children only exercise rights under adult supervision. In the case of surgery, surgery is possible with the consent of the adult (and despite child opposition), but sex and contracts are strictly impossible for children. It is never legally permissible for a parent to rent out their 10 year old under the guise of “parental approval of prostitution”. The spectrum of “social media sites” out there ranges from various altruistic do-good social-support safe spaces to criminal and sexual Angie’s lists. We might then distinguish unsafe websites from safe indeed good websites, and only restrict access to unsafe websites. But who is the subject of such restrictions? The broadest restriction bans all unsafe websites from existing, as determined by an official government censor. First Amendment strongly says no to that. The narrowest restrictions start by limiting the class of individuals allowed to exercise their adult choices, to, dare I say it, adults. There is a line that can be drawn between engaging in sex and reading about sex, which underlies this law (though we have no idea what the members of the Utah legislature were thinking when they voted for the law). The most-accessible distinction is between the actual sex act (the adult cannot deem that the child reasonably consents) and gaining expressive knowledge of sex acts (or criminal acts, etc) where the adult may reasonably make the consent judgment for the child. Of course a hyper-libertarian can always insist that the choice should be left up to the child for all of their acts, and if you want to seriously argue that children should be treated as adults from birth, I suggest starting a separate thread to advance that argument. How then should the government protect the rights of children, if this ID-requirement is seemed to be morally offensive? The answer comes from that initial question about child rights and the role of the adult rights-custodian. Very simply, the child will do whatever it does, and the adult custodian bears responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The adult is responsible for supervising the child, and should be made to bear the consequences of their actions. What is wrong with this law is not that it restricts children from accessing harmful websites and as collateral damage in protecting rights, some adults are inconvenienced. The problem is that the law sees the platform as being solely responsible for the harm, and not the adult who enabled access in the first place. The Utah law is a pragmatic solution, in that there are way fewer platforms than supervising adults, so enforcement against platforms is much easier than enforcement against supervising adults. This law draws a bright line which distinguishes legal from illegal action, the alternative of post hoc lawsuits by children who were harmed by poor parental judgment is unmanageably vague. There is a third alternative, which is to hold social media platforms (not parents) liable for damage to minors (violations of their rights) that they contributed to. Such a law would be limited to responsibility for damage to those not legally capable of consent. The platform can then decide to take the legal risk and not attempt to vet users, or they can protect themselves by id-checking. Their risk, their choice. Adult users who don’t want to be inconvenienced by providing ID can then take their business to a platform without an ID requirement. In short, this is an extremely complex moral issue, which is not resolved by simply declaring “there should be no restrictions on expression”. The question that should be asked by the libertarians is, what is the nature of the crisis that demands a further infantalization of our society where everyone is coddled in a safe space?
  12. An essential feature of the Objectivist ethics is that man is not a sacrificial animal, hence the rejection of self-sacrifice. Objectivism does indeed require the integration of all facts, but not all statements represent facts. The only “fact” involved in an irrational statement is that so-and-so uttered a statement, and a rational man has no obligation to consider such statements. Case in point, a rational man on OO has no obligation to assimilate, address and refute some arbitrary communist racist woke screed – an arbitrary string of words is not ipso facto an “argument”. There is a point at which “argument”- and viewpoint-rejection are valid responses (I would say after a half dozen attempts to elicit signs of rationality from the author, another more-hopeful person might set the threshold at a dozen tries). A person who advocates self-sacrifice isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who refuses to engage in moral evaluation isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who sanctions evasion isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. I do agree with your call for the forum to practice Objectivism (all of it, not just epistemology). Evasion is the antithesis of Objectivism, and I am glad that you now accept that point. Indeed, I would hope that people would be more scrupulous in calling out evasion when it happens
  13. At the outset, I should say that Rand’s theory of concepts is inadequate in only addressing “concept formation” but also inaccurately describing cases of actual formation. Children do not form concepts (her postulations notwithstanding), they acquire them: the concepts already exist in the society, the child has to learn what the extant concepts are in that society. Adults may on occasion actually form concepts, for example “quark”, or “clade”, scientific concepts which refer to novel integrations. Then there is “concept redefinition”, where a person decides to reassign the accepted word–referent relation. This certainly does happen, but it frequently leads to breakdown in communication when one person posits a new word–referent relation, declaring for example “There’s glory for you!” rather than “There’s a nice knock-down argument for you”. Openness is not a characteristic of a forum, but it is a tautologically a defining property of an open forum, a type of forum. I will add that “forum” is like “emergent” and “information”, words that have exploded in popularity over the past 30 years where there is little agreement as to what they mean. I do not fundamentally object to exploring new ideas, but I do object to any implication that new ideas are intrinsically good. A new idea may merit consideration if the idea is swaddled in a rational supporting argument. I suppose Wordpress blogging is one way in which anyone can set forth whatever new ideas they want, or, Google pages. I contend that the intended purpose of OO is not “exploring new ideas”, it is exchange of information about Objectivism and discussion of its applications. Notions of “good” and “bad” are not absolute, they are defined in terms of a specific purpose. If in fact the majority of content on OO ends up having no relationship to Objectivism and is indistinguishable from Twitter with no banning mechanism, then why would an Objectivist want to continue an association with this or some similar forum? In the real scientific world, nobody of any repute uncritically publishes anything and everything submitted just because it is a “new idea”. There are places to deposit one’s uncritical unvetted new ideas, I just spam-can those emails. I would not say that OO is in any sense a scholarly publishing venue, but it does and should strive to be higher-quality than most social media. Quality-control standards are not defined in terms of the viewpoint expressed, they are defined in terms of the logic of the presentation. Sometimes the presentation is logically deficient, and there is a point where the abandonment of reason becomes especially deleterious to a forum dedicated to a philosophy that places reason, not emotion, in a central position. You correctly identified the wording flaw in the guideline. The ukaze Do not post complaints about the behavior of any member on the forum is simply wrong, it is a mis-identification. I don’t propose a specific re-writing, I just offer a criticism of that rule to point out reason can be applied to laws and guidelines alike, so that we might identify a principle that better fits with the purpose of this forum. Which returns us to the question of the purpose of this forum – anything by way of guidelines that you think is clearly in error. For example, the central purpose of this forum (which I take to be an axiom, yet open for discussion)?
  14. I have a general question about Objectivism, of the type “how does one use Objectivism as a tool for living?”. As I understand Objectivism, it is a central premise that man’s proper means of survival is reason, which is reducing knowledge to observation, forming concepts from measurable relationships among concretes then integrating this knowledge by logical rules into propositions. I observed that numerous Objectivist fora have died, subsequently it turns out that there is an apparently-significant distinction between “forum” and “magazine”, a crucial differentiating property being “control”, where exercising editorial control makes a venue not be a forum, instead it is a magazine /journal. So my question is, how should one determine the proper meaning of “magazine” and “forum”? Obvious it would be based on observation, but what are we to observe, and what are we to measure in distinguishing these concepts? My own use of the term was based on a specific type of technology distinguishing a “forum” from a blog, a chat channel, a mailing list, a WhatsApp group, and other means of propagation, distinguished by hierarchical structure and permanence, however, that is not the ancient etymological meaning (a forum was simply an outdoor meeting place). I don’t assume that ancient etymologies dictate contemporary word meaning in English. Magazines and journals do not typically have multi-level recursive topical structure and they do have quantal structure (an “issue” with fixed content). If it is true that by nature there cannot be content-control in a forum, then there are no fora of any type anywhere (this is a factual claim, which can be refuted by pointing to a venue that purports to be a forum and has the essential characteristic of permanence but which does not impose any controls on content), and OO is also not a journal or magazine, so what is it? This is a basic issue in epistemology: people make claims, how can we ever evaluate the truth of those claims (that was the core flaw of the covid thread: objective judgment of truth is impossible if one cannot objectively identify concepts and propositions, and distinguish what is true from what is false). I pointed to the OO guidelines above, the question at hand now is whether the guidelines are dysfunctional and should be revised, or are they correct; and then, have they been followed or violated? A property-rights response would be pointless, in that it does not violate David’s property rights to discuss this issue. If you find the guidelines to be in error and can point to a good reason for changing A into B, then I expect that David would be open to such reasoning. To the extent that some may think that the underlying issue is content, I disagree, I hold that it is about methods. Frankly, the emoji-response option is a terrible feature of the software, especially the lulz-icon which is just plain rude. If you disagree with something that someone posts, you should explain the rational basis of that disagreement and not just dismiss the statement as being laughable. I do think that there is a flaw in the guidelines, that an important section is given low prominence: The forum (acting through its owner, admins, or moderators) reserves the right to modify or delete any material that violates any of these forum rules, or for any other reason that they deem appropriate. For example, the moderators may split, merge, close, or delete questions or threads. Posts with frequent misspellings or grammatical errors may be deleted at the moderator's discretion. They also reserve the right to ban any user if they are in violation of the board's rules, although warnings will generally be given first (especially concerning the more innocent mistakes). Egregious violations of rules may result in a banning without warning. Also, this bit probably needs some re-wording: Do not post complaints about the behavior of any member on the forum - report them to the moderators. Public complaints about other members will be treated as a personal attack and may be deleted! If you think someone deserves a warning, please use the "Report!" link found on every post. The offender will not know who reported him. I do not think that this thread is in violation of that guideline, yet I do think that we are skirting around the edges of a personal attack (on more than one party). Should personal attacks be prohibited, and if so, what constitutes a personal attack? How should we effectively communicate the distinction between disagreement and a personal attack?
  15. I disagree at the level of fact here. A prelude to an agency writing a regulation is that the agency must first be created by Congress, and be given a location under the executive branch. Without specific empowering legislation, the agency has no power to interpret laws and find someone to be in violation of that law. Everything that the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of State does is an interpretation of a law passed by Congress, and in fact the laws upon which the EPA calls on in a regulation are cited in the Federal Register when the rule is proposed, modified and finalized. It is a question of fact whether laws passed by Congress are more often prohibitions or allowances / commands: individuals are prohibited from…, the government is allowed / commanded to… Here is what has been passed this year. No new agencies have been created, lots of spending has been authorized, parts of the government have been commanded to do or refrain from doing. There is a bottom line in Chevron Deference that Congress has to have actually commanded specific action or inaction, it is insufficient that an agency be created “to protect the environment”. Chevron Deference arose because Congress passed a law (42 USC Ch. 85) that purports to prohibited pollution by burdening the “source” of pollution, but failed to define what constitutes being a “source” (radically simplified, read the ruling here). Congress acted and prohibited, and commanded the EPA, and the EPA was only following orders (at the end of the Carter administration, probably not causally related to his subsequent electoral defeat). I think I will go out on a limb a bit here and claim that no federal agency has ever been created without there also being specific commanded actions, perhaps the Dept. of Foreign Affairs and the Sec'y of State position, created before the Constitution and Congress existed, was sufficiently unspecific. I invite you to identify an Congressional act creating an agency without a specific empowerment. Pretty much by definition, an "agency" can only do what a superior commands them to do. Sure, "State" has been around forever, likewise "Defense" (name changes don't count). We can easily identify agencies that can be wholesale eliminated. State, Treasury, Defense and Justice are the only legitimate executive branches, Homeland Security is redundant, and the rest simply should not exist at all.
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