John McVey

G'uhhhhhhhDAY! BTW, it is usually safe to leave the gate open, so long as the cattle grid is functional. The ops here are good with their rifles when the sheep learn to do commando-rolls over it. Mmmmmmm.... bbq... JJM

You could be surprised how far a leftist can take rationalisations. I recall having a yarn several years ago with a full-on communist from New York... who had his own business as an IT consultant. He 'justified' it on the grounds that he didn't employ anyone. My old politics lecturer at uni also told stories of Melbourne-Greek members of the Communist Party of Australia, of how they all actively supported communism while at the same time running their shops and cafes, too. He said they said it was alright because they'd hand it all over come the revolution. The flunkey from Chile in Atlas was an ex-businessman, too: JJM

BTW, similar thread here. I can't say as there was any particular event. I've just always been independent-minded and explicitly encouraged to be so by my parents. My first degree was in electrical engineering, and I've always been reality and reasoning oriented. When I finally came across AS and TF during that degree my adoption of Objectivism was mostly seamless. I did have major problems with rationalism, but I didn't hold any ideas that conflicted with Objectivism in any significant way as I recall. There was one thing in Objectivist epistemology that I had figured out for myself as a young teenager - I realised that 'twoness' was something that had a basis in reality, but that we had to identify it ourselves. I think I figured that out as a result of starting to learn German in school, because the same one idea had different names in different languages that had different origins. That was as far as my thoughts on concept-formation went, but it was enough for me to grab the thesis of ITOE with both hands. JJM

Phwoah! Check THIS out - an article in The Australian newspaper, summarising a lecture presentation by a national politician (Dr Craig Emerson, Labor Minister for Small Business), trashing environmentalism and openly calling for an enlightenment based on reason and - get this - an integration of this enlightenment with a renewed respect for de-regulated economics codes ("Economic Rationalism" is an Australian term for the low-taxation and de-regulation sentiment of the 80's). Here is a politician who appears to understand the connection between reality, reason, freedom, capitalism and prosperity! (Hat-tip: Tim Blair's blog) This would be shocking enough were it to come from our centre-right Liberal Party in Australia, but this is coming from a front-bencher in the Australian Labor Party. A few possibilities come to mind. The first is just as what many commentators there have suggested - that he is someone who has finally summoned up the courage to say the unfashionable things that needed to be said. This I think is the most likely. He does have form for not doing what he was expected to by the people who put in in positions of authority - he got his seat by dint of electioneering by a major union in his electorate, but then angered that union's boss by not voting for the party leader the boss wanted him to! More generally, like all major parties the ALP is split into factions, and Dr Emerson is known to be a member of the "hard right", which has its origins in the pro-industry trade unions. He is not alone in recognising environmentalism's threat to jobs, and what he is doing economically is echoing the slightly-hands-off approach of the Hawke/Keating years in the 1980's. I hope he wont be the last of this faction to publicly call out against eco-nonsense. The second is also what others have suggested, that he wont be in that party for long. I discount this one as it would be too obviously ideologically motivated if he were booted out for speaking his mind. Again, as noted, he is not really as alone as some of the commentators have suggested, an increasing number of people are seeing ever more clearly that greenism is a naked threat to jobs and standards of living, and so there would be a noisy fight were the party to try to censure him. The third is that he has been deliberately let do this. I don't think it would be an exercise in window dressing, ie in the manner of mentioning something to be later dismissed as 'dealt with', because the import of this is too great. It would be too obviously seen in advance for the major crack-in-the-dam that it is, because there is a substantial pro-industry anti-environmentalist sentiment in this country and they'd know that this is going to get traction. Rather, if he was deliberately let do this then it occurs to me that it is a set-up so that KRudd&Co can back out of their commitments and promises while putting the blame for this on the ALP's right faction. While it's a possibility, and I did see that one person on Tim Blair's blog thinks KRudd is "setting up to triangulate the Greens, Dick Morris style," I don't think this one likely because it is a serious slap in the face to a major element of the ALP leadership (Penny Wong and Peter Garrett, for instance) and its arguments would bolster Emerson's faction over theirs. I also think the Australian electorate are more than sophisticated enough to see that kind of faction-motivated BS for what it is - it might get votes because the Coalition are buffoons, but it would also undermine KRudd's public support and hence internal party support because of the threat that the Coalition might get its act together. It is hardly a perfect piece. He does mention personal freedom positively, but he is not standing up for anyone's actual rights never mind calling for anything remotely approaching laissez-faire. A frequent target of his ire is businesses and consultants, not on the grounds of them individually doing wrong but on the soft-paternalist grounds that profit-driven activities has an inherent tendency to pander to and promote irrationality - he wouldn't be able to last five minutes in the ALP without actually believing that. To that end he wants the Australian Enlightenment so that people can be better informed when they engage in debate regarding public policy (ie government regulation). Given that this article is a summary of a presentation he made to the Australian classical-liberal thinktank The Centre for Independent Studies, I am guessing that as a trained economist he is either a Millsian utilitarian or at least considerably sympathetic towards it, with all the philosophical flaws this entails. Nevertheless, I give major kudos to this guy for understanding and actively promoting reason and science, openly recognising the rationality of economic freedom, that they all go together, and that environmentalism is a threat to all of it because it is mysticism at root. As is commonly said in these circumstances, MORE, AND FASTER PLEASE! JJM

Orrrrrighty, I've added myself! JJM

According to the Journals, it was to be called "To Lorne Dieterling": JJM

I mostly agree with Pokarrin that there's a problem with the definition of subset and that the change suggested is much better, though I think there's more that needs the attention of a rational expert before settling on that definition. What I do strongly believe, however, is that Balakrishnan's "vacuous reasoning" is blatant context-dropping. If P is a subset of Q then this implies that there is a concretely identifiable commonality between the two sets that goes beyond the fact that P contains at least some of what Q does. It is not just that P must have at least one element, but that element must be chosen for a particular reason or serve some analytical purpose that the superset was also capable of serving: there is the question of how P came to be so constituted as well as what P contains to consider (ditto for Q). Without this attention to the how there is no foundation to give any meaning to an empty set when it arises. Consider the statement "I don't have any candy in my pocket." The reaction that this statement would get is entirely dependent on context: if the context is clear from the situation at hand (eg a boy walked up to his mother and said it) then the reaction will be understandable, whereas if it is said out of the blue (eg if I said it to the maintenance supervisor at work) the reaction is apt to be strange. Context provides meaning to a negative statement. For that reason, I wouldn't dismiss Balakrishnan's "vacuous reasoning" merely because it raises the concept of the empty set as I have heard of being done elsewhere. Under normal circumstances I'd agree with the charge of 'reification of the zero' in relation to things like this, but on a related note I know of three particular cases of equations with division by zero or infinity are not automatically nonsensical. There is a thing called L'hopital's Rule (is this what you have in mind, Pokarrin?). This rule says that when one has an equation that works out under some circumstance to be zero divided by zero, zero multiplied by infinity, or infinity multiplied by infinity, there could be (though there might still not be) a meaningful answer when the equation elements giving the zeroes or infinities are taken to their first derivatives under the use of limits and then divided or multiplied. Whether a comparable methodology might exist in the use of sets I am not knowledgeable enough to say, but, a), it gives at least one line of inquiry to pursue (consider the possibility that some answer is dependent on the number of instances of set P that are in set Q, where the two sets' contents are variable - one could potentially have a case in a relation of set P to set Q where set P turns out to be the empty set under certain conditions and so Q has an infinite number of instances of P in it), and b ), places emphasis on the context in which any particular instance of the empty set arises if there is to be any basis for meaningfulness. If reasoning along those lines is fruitful then one can say, in some well-defined circumstances, that the empty set turns out to be a subset of another set, and thence to make a definite inference from this conclusion. If that is the case, then Pokarrin's definition is too restrictive and what is required is a qualification of some kind of Balakrishnan's. If not, well, what Seeker said. I'd say so, too. Vacuous, meaning empty like a vacuum, lacking meaningful content. I am no expert in epistemology, but off the top of my head the notion of "vacuously true" sounds like the analytic side of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy - rationalistic deduction devoid of any connection to observation from which to obtain premises to deduce with. JJM

And such men lead precarious lives indeed - and that's irrespective of whether they're the king of the jungle or not. In the absence of protection of rights, society spirals downward, taking expected life-spans down with it and sending mortality rates skyward. At the absolute bottom, where daily existence has returned to the state of primitive pre-industrial hand-to-mouth existence, sure, people could stay alive (average life-span around 20 years or so) and eke out a miserable existence under constant threat of expropriation by the gang or ruler of the moment, or constant threat of having one's rule overthrown and life taken by one's victims at any moment, but that's hardly living. No, she is spot on. Your problem in this matter is that you are trying to understand the concept of rights by deducing it "directly" from a single precept, divorced from the entire field of morality and lacking due recognition for the context for rights. Rights arise from the application of morality to the particular question of life in society (see the second excerpt on the same Lexicon page). It is through the foundations of the science of ethics that rights are the consequence of man's nature, because our nature as conceptual and volitional beings makes morality applicable to us. The field of morality begins with the fact that life is an end in itself. In application to each individual, this means the proper beneficiary of one's own actions is oneself. Morality also begins with the fact that all life-forms have a definite means of survival, and that since for us this is the use of the mind, reason is our means of survival and so the primary virtue is the commitment to the proper use of reason: that is, rationality. Morality then goes on to identify further virtues, and show that there are also a number of vices. The one of particular relevance here is the initiation of force against others; it is an assault on the reasoning faculty of both parties, is an action antithetical to every single virtue, and so necessarily undercuts the survival chances of both victim and perpetrator. An initiation of force is an attempt to violate the law of causality: for instance, the judgement of the mind to produce something includes consideration for the benefits to be gained (cause and effect), but initiation of force to steak that product takes away what was a precondition of that first party acting (a cause with no effect, or an effect in contradiction to the nature of the entity that was the cause). It is in relation to these facts that your comment about about men sustaining their lives without means is nonsensical. As Miss Rand put it in Francisco's money speech, "Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money ... When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter." To begin to discover rights, one takes the facts of what is virtuous - of what one needs to do in principle in order to survive and pursue one's own selfish interests - and follows a series of recognitions. Since we are required to follow these principles if we seek to serve our selfish interests we are also entitled to do so and bear the consequences accordingly, because our lives are our own and we should be the beneficiaries of our own actions. That includes the entitlement to defend our entitlements to act on these principles and retain the consequences, against others. For instance, we need to act for our own benefit, so we produce food. Our need for food gives us the entitlement, in the context of us acting virtuously and having successfully exercised the virtue of productiveness, to protect our crops, cattle, stores, and so on, against depredation by others: we need to act (eg to produce) and bear the consequences (eg to be able consume what we have produced), and so it is right for us to do so and defend that against looters and moochers. We then recognise that the same also applies to others on their own behalf, that they too have entitlements and are entitled to defend themselves against others (including us). We must recognise the same of others at the same time as we demand others recognising this of us. If we have certain moral entitlements because of key elements of our natures, so do others who share those same elements. In terms of theory, a violation of this is rank hypocrisy; and in terms of practice a violation of this endangers the needs of our own existences, as history amply demonstrates. For instance, we recognise there is no justification for getting indignant at another who defends his food as above, just as we have done. He is no more obliged to make sacrifices on our behalf than we are to do so on his behalf: we should not be a looter or moocher, either, and the attempt is not at all in our own selfish interests because it is attempting to obliterate a key condition for how what we would be looting or mooching came into existence in the first place. Finally, we recognise the harmony if interests among rational men; it is not merely a matter of avoiding hypocrisy or thinking we're not cunning enough to be prudent predators. Instead, our interests directly lie in recognising the rights of others because of our need to act on principle, that these principles include recognising others' own moral entitlements and that the initiation of force against them in violation of those entitlements is contrary to our own needs. Action either to mutual benefit or of amiable parting of ways is that consonant with virtue, and initiation of force against others is a vice. In the context of normal society, this means that nobody acting rationally is inherently a threat to anyone else, and is instead a potential opportunity for great mutual gain. We then realise that our interests lie in the maintenance of that state of affairs, which means we must recognise the rights of others not just in our direct dealing with them and in more general terms when we empower governments to enumerate and protect everyone's rights as a matter of principle. We empower a government authority to recognise our property rights in our food and cattle etc, and also to recognise the same on the part of others and expect that government to protect others rights because if others' rights are threatened then so are our own: if we allow a looter or moocher to violate any one person's rights then everybody's are also in the crosshairs. From there, one then goes on to show the fundamental rights. In particular, as per your question, the right to life comes directly from the foundations of morality: just as it is morally right to act to as to further one's proper self-interests, so too it must be a fundamental political right to pursue one's life and self-interests: it is right to live, so we have the right to life. Our selfish interests requires that we both demand recognition of our right to life and also cheerfully recognise it of others too. As a consequence, we all together enshrine that right in a founding document that is binding upon the agency empowered to protect all derivatives of that right. JJM

Yup. That's also what Miss Rand noted in "Stimulus and response", regarding the anti-volitional creed of B F Skinner and his attack on "autonomous man" to make man more tractable and moldable to suit collective ends. ("Stimulus and response" is a single essay in PWNI, also in four parts in the Ayn Rand Letter comprising volumes 8 to 11.) She then goes on to note that someone said that use of Skinner's work should be kept minimal, which she suggests is say to prison reform - presumably, that would include substance-abuse reform. JJM

It's not the who by itself, it's the conditions of how the who have what they have and what they are allowed to do with it. All that the money physically does is pay for resources (capital goods, input materials, labour, and so on). What the issue of who gets the money under what conditions determines is what particular resources are purchased and who uses them. There would be no essential difference between a single person and a broad range of people investing if in both cases it was all people's own money they were investing. When people are free, this rapidly leads to the best outcome because people fail or suceed dependent on their own rationality and productivity: the best get rewarded in a way that increases their ability to produce more, and conversely for the not so good. If, on the other hand, there is some law preventing the people most adept at investing or using investments in particular fields from investing, then even if the public invests in that same field the results wont be as good because the actual front-line users of the resources are highly likely not to be as good at selecting and using them as the adept people would be. Rationality and productivity are no longer the sole considerations, so that means resources are wasted to a much greater degree than normal lack-of-knowledge would cause, in turn causing a detriment to what our standard of living could have been. On top of that is what I mentioned before, that the caprice of taxation makes it harder to produce forecasts. One way of compensating for that is increasing the risk premium component of minimum required rates of return ("hurdle rate") used to judge potential investments against. The greater the scope for caprice, the more risk premium, so the higher the hurdle rate used by a given investor. As that rate goes up it can be shown that it leads to less and less efficient modes of production, even though throughout all this the amount of money in exchange and the frequency of exchanges may remain unchanged. JJM

Those aren't the only options. On the assumption that you have no prior-standing obligation to get something done in there (such as it being in some secure facility and it's your job along with him to fix something before it goes kaboom or releases some nasty bug under research into the outside world), first, just ask him to let you out if you know he has the key. If he wont let you out then he is committing an actual crime (I'm presuming a western country). Do what you need to in order to get out, starting with the least aggressive methods first, then escalating as quickly as the context necessitates (this includes consideration of potential outside help). Even if he doesn't accept individual rights that doesn't necessarily mean he wont obey the law as it presently stands - in the same manner, we obey many regulatory laws even though we don't recognise their validity. So, unless he himself gets seriously threatening (itself another crime), I don't see it getting as far as actually killing him - at most, a pistol-whipping to get the key off him and the ability to drag his hand where required. Then call the police as soon as you're out. What's the current event this is supposed to be an analogy for? JJM

Just the economics, I think. We (Cognis Australia) use algae to produce beta-carotene, and I know of other algae-using outfits producing astaxanthin, so I know for a fact that the algae-processing technology he is discusing in general is for real. Whether he is personally for real or just a snake-oil salesman is another matter, but that can't be identified just from that video without further information on his particular processes and then revenues versus costs. Off the top of my head, he'd be chewing through quite a lot of electricity to run all those pumps. Another major expense would be his fertiliser. Natural gas is one of the two feedstocks used make ammonia with (the other being nitrogen from the air), and so the price of fertiliser has gone up in line with the general increases in all fuels over the last several years. A third cost would be the capital charges on all that equipment he has. That little pilot plant he had showed umpteen thousand dollars worth of PVC piping alone, and that was for a unit the size of large a bedroom. I shudder to think what the cost would be when scaled up to the multi-acreage he mentioned. We can do what we do, partly because we use the surface-method he discusses, but mostly because materials like beta-carotene and astaxanthin are worth a pretty penny - not even top-grade fuels come anywhere near the kind of price-ranges these materials sell for. The flip side is that the product content per algae cell is much less than the proportions he mentions for his fuels-producing algae, so maybe he can make money through volume. My conclusion is: I'd happily take his word for it that he has a functioning process, but I am skeptical on its profitability yet I can't dismiss it out of hand without seeing figures. JJM

Option 1, yes, every Tom Dick and Harry can see that, but want to avoid it by using other government powers to prevent price rises. Part of that will be the enactment of option 2 in various ways to avoid option 1. What is not self evident is profits being used for investment. In many people's minds there is a great disconnect between profit and investment. A lot of people, I find, think that profit is a dead end and the money just exits the economy, leaving nothing behind. This is also implicit in the consumptionist fallacy - in fact, if memory serves me, Mr Salsman spoke about this in one of his lectures as an explicit aim by the Hoover administration as a response to the Great Depression: the severe curtailment of profit as the means to attempting to keep wages high and thus consumer spending high. What's interesting about the original article this thread started with is the care and concern for the well-being high income earners, even if only as milk-cows and with a flawed economic perspective to express that concern through. In times past there would just have been naked calls for taxing them out of existence and redistributing the money to lower income earners so they will spend it. I think there's also a disconnect between want of more competition and the curtailment of investable funds by large corporations on the one hand with the total amount of investment activity on the other. Some people don't want ExxonMobil et al to invest, they want the door left open for others to do the investing (think of the "day in the sun" attitude on the part of the small oil companies when Wyatt quits). These are the people who whine about the lack of competition, and want the Big Oil stopped so as to let smaller operators in - more competition to keep down both prices and profits. This is a premise behind anti-trust rules, and as Dr Ridpath noted in the article "The philosophic origin of Anti-trust" in the Objectivist Forum (republished in the book "The abolition of anti-trust"), the anti-trust movement got real teeth only after Frank Knight noted that some profits were superfluous and added nothing to the economy (a tie-in to the above). People who think like this are implicitly thinking that total investment can somehow continue as before, creating jobs as normal, irrespective of the bars in the way of the best companies earning profits to invest with. Thus, they wont be bothered at all if "only" the big corporations have their profits cut and investment plans derailed by "windfall" taxation. JJM

While the article is definitely written from a consumptionist view, and is accordingly dead wrong in its inferences from rich people's actions, there's nothing specifically Keynesian about it. The latter comes only by association, because Keynes was the pre-eminent modern consumptionist. JJM

It's when Part Two, Chapter 6, page 526 in the paperback 35th Anniversary edition, or pp521-522 in the edition used by the CD ROM: JJM

Welcome to the Forum! To be an Objectivist you need to have, first, exercised your own judgement on the truth or otherwise of anything, including Objectivism, accepting what you validate for yourself and not accepting what you can't see for yourself or disagree with, and second, agree with the principles of Objectivism as a consequence of the foregoing independent judgement. People who do the second without the first, those who are unwilling to contemplate saying "I don't agree with Miss Rand on point X," are an annoyance known by the term "Randroids," who give the rest us who do perform the critical first part on independent judgement a bad name. Now, as part of that independent judgement, you also need to figure out what is in fact part of the philosophy of Objectivism, what is Miss Rand's application of the philosophy to particular issues that are themselves not part of philosophy, and what is an expression of Miss Rand's own value judgements that she measured according to her own standard of value and so which may not at all apply to you. A particular thing she said isn't part of Objectivism just because she said it! In regards to smoking, for example, some say there's no problem whatever, some that it's just a classic case of all things in moderation, and some who don't agree with smoking at all, but none of the three camps can say that the members of the other camps are or are not Objectivists based solely on that point. The same reasoning applies to other controversies with in Objectivism. Another particular that once caused some grief with people was her position in "About a woman president." Sooner or later, once your reading gets wide enough and your judgement thorough enough, you will come the conclusion on some point: Miss Rand made a mistake here. What then, you ask? Of those three divisions I mentioned about what Miss Rand said, if your own judgement leads you to disagree with the philosophy itself, then at that point you should stop calling yourself an Objectivist until such time as you determine for yourself that your judgement was mistaken and that Miss Rand was right. If, on the other hand, you agree with the philosophy itself but not its particular applications or Miss Rand's particular value judgements, then you are indeed still an Objectivist despite your disagreements. Others will argue with you on those points, sometimes even vehemently so, but they (if they are themselves bona fide Objectivists) wont tell you to stop calling yourself an Objectivist unless their own rational judgement based on the evidence you give them leads them to believe that you aren't exercising your own. Likewise, you shouldn't be telling others that they shouldn't call themselves Objectivists except on the same grounds. So, for the same reason you aren't automatically precluded from calling yourself an Objectivist merely because you disagree with something she said - it depends on how you came to disagree with it and its position in relation to the philosophy itself. The position part you will have to judge for yourself (feel free to ask questions here, it's what the forum is for), but at the very least you need to judge for yourself and agree with the content of OPAR and then once you have thoroughly digested that I recommend the lecture series Understanding Objectivism by Dr Peikoff, available from the Ayn Rand Bookstore. There are many other lecture series available there, too, that you might want to examine. I should also add that should you honestly judge that Miss Rand was mistaken in some part of the philosophy of Objectivism itself, you will still be respected so long as it is your best rational judgement that lead you to that conclusion. You will get a fair hearing from Objectivists if you seek a rational discussion of your disagreement and are fully open to evidence and logical argument. This includes not just this forum here but other good quality Objectivist forums and places of discussion. That's a non-sequitur, ie it does not follow. You're right that the quote means that each of us has to take charge of our minds and figure out what philosophy to follow lest we be lead by the nose by a philosophy of dubious provenance, but it does not follow that the philosophy that we would thereby figure out is unique to each of us. It is the philosophy of Ayn Rand insofar as she discovered it, not that it is uniquely applicable to her alone. It is as nonsensical to say that only Miss Rand is an Objectivist and permitted to use it to live as it is to say that only Newton is permitted to make use of Newtonian mechanics in physics. The philosophy she discovered is universal to all men, because it is based on the same set of facts faced by us all; that we are physical beings of a certain type, including possessing conceptual consciousnesses operating in the same fashion, living in the same one causal universe whose laws stand independent of our minds and which we must discover by means appropriate to the nature of our minds if we are to be successful at living in that universe. What is discovered on that basis is applicable to all of us: if we each look at reality, carry out the proper thinking method appropriate to our kinds of consiousness, then we will all come to the same conclusion about, and form the same general view of, existence. What differs after that is the concrete applications, such as what concrete purpose one chooses in life. Sorting this distinction out is included within what you'll learn from Understanding Objectivism. Miss Rand was a trailblazer, and now that she has made the trail the rest of us can follow it more easily than were we left to our own devices. We still have to figure out for ourselves that what she said is right, but her having discovered solutions to problems makes the job a lot easier and quicker than it would otherwise be for us. Some then go on to blaze further trails of their own. There are a number of philosophers and related new intellectuals, here and elsewhere, taking up where Miss Rand left off, adding their contributions to human knowledge and likewise continuing to make life for the rest of us that much better. You, too, can do that, and still be an Objectivist. JJM

Wikipedia says it is circa 1920 and was a controversy was called The Great Debate. The scientist you're referring to is Heber Curtis, apparently. Some of the physicists on this forum could probably verify this, but from what I can recall of an English TV program "The Universe" (I think that's the one), the timing is about right. IIRC, the program also noted that Ed Hubble provided crucial data from red-shift observations, which Wikipedia also mentions. I was thinking in terms of David's distinction between real concepts and myth-concepts. Until it was proven that the sun was one star among many the idea of other solar systems was, at best, a myth concept, just as is today the myth-concept of multiple universes. What changed 'solar system' from being a myth-concept to a real one was identification of the sun as a star and of that there's no reason why the laws of nature that formed it and its planets could not also have been instantiated in relation to other stars as well. With that, as David points out, one can validly infer these other instantiations prior to observing them for real. JJM

Excellent, thank you. That's a word I can use - thank you! Yes. I had that implicit in my original exposition, and mentioned it a few times later. The reference should be in the heart of the exposition, specifically in the measurement-formulation section. Working from your proposal, Jenni's observation, and adding in what I think I have figured out for myself, how about the following: - Start with some known laws and observations - add a curious instance - notice a possible cause of which the curious instance is a potentially valuable effect - identify a way in which the desired effect could be replicated at will by enacting that cause or a similar cause through an object that introduces some part of the cause-effect chain; this is the first measurement-formulation part, and is dependent on strict adherence to the laws of nature to be a valid identification - identify what is essential and what is not about the potential object insofaras as its ability to enact the cause leading to the desired effect is concerned; this is the first measurement-omission part - on the basis of the above extrapolate the object's cause-effect abilities into a plurality of such objects and identify each as a unit; this is more of both measurement-formulation and measurement-omission, and likewise requires full adherence to the laws of nature to be a valid process - carry out the rest of the concept-formation process upon the extrapolated units to form the concept of the class of object. JJM

From the concept-of-the-universe thread... This actually reminds me of a question I have had in the back of my mind for a long time. I have a rough answer, but I never got around to dealing with it properly. Someone came up with the idea of a solar system, conceptualising it, long before there was proof that planets outside our system existed. Accordingly, it had long been a staple of science-fiction. There was a valid concept before there were known two or more actual instances to omit the measurements of (which, specifically, would be the actual nature of the planets etc on around their respective stars). There is a parallel to this phenomenon in another branch of science: invention of new devices. A concept for a class of existents is created before there are two or more instances of it, often before there are any instances at all. How, then, is the concept validly formed? This question has been almost-asked here before, but RSalar's question wasn't directly about the process of concept-formation in regards to an invention (it is merely asserted in post 56 that it is a concept). So, that thread doesn't real with the particular issues I have in mind. Consider RSalar's inventor of the screw and the screwdriver, as written up by Featherfall: All that is well and good, but refers specifically to the particular objects she is making and thinking of. The issue is not the one object she is making but her potential realisation that what she has invented is an entire class of objects. During the process of making her new nail-replacement device to hang a picture up with she may well realise that there is an entire class of ends that can be served by the same rotational-leverage principle she is making use of. She can think of the same principle applied to nail-replacements of different sizes, different thread dimensions, different materials for different applications, and so on, all while as yet not even finished making the first concrete instance to serve her end of the moment. If she doesn't have that realisation then the other posters are right to say that the name she gives to the object she creates is not a word designating a concept but just a proper name - but what if she does realise the potential? Is that a concept, and if so, where is the measurement omission prior to there being any concrete instances having measurements that can be omitted? The answer I have come up with so far is that it is a special case of measurement omission, where the difference lies in the source of the measurements thus omitted. The inventor has not just a specific task in mind to be performed by the invention, but an entire class of those tasks. The inventor can create a valid concept for a whole class of objects, even before any instances are produced, because he knows in advance what is essential and what is not, using the needs of the task as the standard of measurement. Instead of looking at the concretes, measuring them and then omitting the measurements, the inventor instead looks at concretes, measures them, formulates other measurements based on the first measurements, and then those formulated measurements are omitted as required. In this fashion, for instance, the inventor of the screw can validly form the concept of the screw because she omits the measurement of the kind of materials from which a screw could be made or the various dimensions of threads etc, but validly makes those measurements to be omitted because she draws them from real measurements of the materials involved as she finds them in reality. Far from being an exception to the normal process of concept formation, conceptualisation of inventions is utterly dependent on that process and its proper enactment: the inventor has to at one stroke identify a valid conceptual common denominator as a basis for differentiation and integration, identify two or more valid potential measurements that actually exist in reality that are then to be omitted, imagine not just a concrete prototype for a concrete end but recognition of it as a unit, imagine additional units that can exist in reality and so do the job where that can-exist part comes from their imagined measurements' relationships to the actual measurements of real applications, integrate those units into a concept by omitting the imagine measurements prior formulated on the basis of the actual measurements of applications and integrating the units into a concept on the basis of the CCD, and then create a word (or a few words) to signify that concept. Again, what differs is only that the actual measurements of reality involved are of the applications of the invention rather than units of the invention. The difference is one of content, not method. The need for the full concept formation process holds not only for the particular concept of the invention but in the formulation of the theory behind the task and of every crucial concept that went into it - that holds all the time, of course, but for an invention this is critical if the formulated measurements and imagined additional units are to be grounded in reality. A breach of strictest rationality and reality-adherence at any point would totally invalidate the concept and the invention would be a failure: for instance, failing to consider the strength of a given material from which a screw to suit a given application can be made, might lead to collapse of what is held up by it. Similarly, the concept of a solar system could be valid before knowing of the existence of others besides our own only after scientific investigation of how that the sun is is in fact just one star among many rather than something sui generis as had previously been thought, how our solar system and its constituents were formed, how since the laws of nature are universal there's no reason why the same laws could not have also been at work with the same types of materials we know to exist elsewhere, and so on. Are there any errors or deficiencies to point out, has someone already said this, or are there other general comments? JJM

Magic and the like do have basis in reality, they are real effects and observations with explanations exaggerated way out of proportion and extraneous nonsense mixed in. Magic is not made out of whole cloth, Kane: how would you, for instance, explain magnetic attraction and repulsion if you didn't have the benefit of the modern scientific mindset? Sympathetic vibration? Catalysis? Disinfection by heat and chemical? Modernity began when people started to think for themselves and examined the allegations made by magicians, alchemists, and astrologers. Some of them were themselves magicians, alchemists , and astrologers - men such as Galen, Geber, Kepler, and Newton. From their work, originating in analysis of the "magical", we now have physics, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, mathematics. Carl Sagan described Kepler as one of the first modern astronomers and last scientific astrologers, because he set the scene for the identification of astrology as bogus. What Clarke pointed out that some people's grips on reality may not be as strong as they should be and so these people regress to magical explanations when exposed to the sufficiently perplexing, being reverse-Kepleresque as it were - after all, that's how the idea of magic got started in the first place. JJM

Clarke's Third Law. JJM

It's not carbon dioxide that's the problem with cows, it's the methane part, as the original article points out. In net via a complicated set of steps, carbon dioxide is being taken from the atmosphere and turned into methane. The total carbon in the biosphere cycle remains constant (ie no de-sequestration), but methane is a twenty-five times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is, thereby increasing the greenhouse effect without changing the total amount of gasses or the carbon content of the biosphere. What that article is talking about is changing the cows' feed so that the flatulence contains less methane and more carbon dioxide to be released back to where it came from, which would then return the biosphere cycle (ie leaving aside contributions from oil-fueled farm vehicles etc) to no net greenhouse contribution just as you describe. The argument, on its own terms, is scientifically sound. What's not scientifically sound is the importance attached to the contribution of methane (and other man-contributed substances) to the maintenance and alteration of global temperatures - last I heard the 'scientists' involved still can't get the details of clouds and water vapour right, and they are a far higher source of the causes of air temperatures than what man has provided. The research is most likely a waste of time and resources, and the political fall-out will be even worse, just as Dr's Hsieh and Lockitch note. JJM

I think it would be best to drop the term ‘rebellion’ altogether – it smacks of a condescending treatment of a key point in people’s lives in an anti-intellectual manner. At about age 12-14, when kids start 'rebelling,' it's when they first start thinking for themselves and trying to formulate their own values and identities as distinct from their parents’. As a mere anecdote, I never rebelled against anything, I just started making my own judgements, irrespective of who agreed or disagree with me, parents and teachers included. If I agreed with them then that was that, and if not then I just kept my own counsel. So, you’re right about it being intellectual, but not the rebellion part. Thus it's not rebellion as such that needs to be fomented, but of providing kids with the means of independent judgement and applying the standard of value to their own lives. That includes sometimes giving those kids the means for seeing for themselves that their parents may well be right and are examples to follow, not to rebel against. Again as an anecdote, despite their other faults, I knew my parents did that much for me, that taught me the value of independent thought and I appreciated it even then. Actually, just getting good humanities professors would be enough, that the talking heads would themselves follow along (or, more accurately, be replaced with other talking heads), if we had the time for the effects of this to work themselves out. As it happens, Drs Brook and Ghate are saying not, but I do not have sufficient information to say whether they're right or wrong on the 20-year time-frame point in particular. You're falling into the fallacy of social affairs either being exclusively a purely grass-roots phenomenon or politically-driven, in effect that of collectivism vs fascism as the only alternatives explaining man’s social arrangements. Politics is a grass-roots phenomenon to the extent that it takes the widespread acceptance by people for the politics in question to succeed - but why to people accept what they do? It is not the politicians' influence, except in the concrete-level details. Who, then, sets the underlying tone? Influence is top-down, but the top in question is not politics, it is in humanities departments of universities. In particular, the top is the intellectuals promoting ideas in epistemology and ethics, compared to which the consequent politics is the proverbial fly on the axel. This fact will hold even in Objectivistopia, for the reason of the simple fact of the Division of Labour: not everyone can be a dedicated philosopher or hyper-articulate analyst, so there will be specialists (professionals and top-notch amateurs alike) whose opinions and advice will be considered and acted upon by the rest of us (ideally, after having formulated rational judgements of those specialists’ abilities and characters). Every major Objectivist thinker has been saying this and explaining why it is so for decades, starting with Miss Rand herself, but you have somehow managed to miss this. This is from the same poster who notes that religion is the number one impediment? I didn't say it assuredly was, at least not yet. I only noted that it was something that could not be casually dismissed, and that if it did happen then nowhere on earth would be safe, thus ruling out any Objectivistopia in a world where the US is a hellhole. In the meantime, the intermediate might appear somewhat more benign, such as that young unmarried Christian couple I mentioned. Christianity seemed benign in its original early days, too. Where did this resurgence come from? Has that core source been spent? As far as I can tell – and similarly as far as Drs Brook and Ghate can tell – not by a long shot. From what I can recall of the matter (ie more than just the lectures), there’s demographics involved, too. If memory serves me, aren’t the religious regions the ones with the highest birth-rates, while the least religious aren’t even close to the bare replacement rate? Certainly, parentage is not destiny, but it takes a certain courage to buck the local culture. It’s still fairly easy to do that now (depending on the particular local culture in question), but as an outsider looking in it appears to me to be getting harder – not just in terms of threats but through trying to fight the accumulation of sickly-sweet drips of its apparent benignity. Again, the primacy-of-politics fallacy. You read the same summary at the head of this thread as I did, right? In point in fact, Dr Ghate indicated that JFK felt the need expressly to disavow making a sop of that kind. The evangelical vote did not exist, as a real entity, until the Goldwater campaign. Goldwater woke them up to their own power, and they’ve begun to use it and expand it. There is a growing trend at work, not a routine that has always been followed. The sops have been getting bigger since then, with fits and starts, and if that keeps up without challenge then one day they wont be mere sops. Are you thus suggesting that Dr Ghate has his history wrong? One of Dr Ghate's points was that it is a major warning sign that a President had to make such an appearance at all. As was said, fifty years ago JFK was compelled to decry the involvement of state in religion. A “feel-good” measure you say? Exactly! Even if at the moment it was toothless, why did that particular project feel good in light of an opposite feeling in the past? Are you honestly suggesting we should just shrug our shoulders at the fact that such an initiative was ever required in the first place? Judging from your responses to me, while simultaneously fighting with Sophia on how religious the US is, is your position then that the US culture will remain in a more or less physically harmless state of cloying universal religiosity for the rest of the foreseeable future? If so then that strikes me as more than just a trifle naïve. JJM

If you don't trust it, don't buy it. If you don't know enough about it, examine it. If you don't have the ability to examine the product yourself, seek third-party expert advice. If you ask, how can you trust the third party, and don't have the slightest clue as to the answer, then how on earth can you claim the ability to adjudge the merits of the politicians whom you are asking to point guns at people? And if you can answer it, why do you need the politicians and their hired guns? At the end of the day, consumer-rights advocacy is the demand to be absolved from the need to formulate judgements. What is at the end of that road? So, damn straight we're hostile to it. JJM