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DavidOdden

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Posts posted by DavidOdden

  1. 14 hours ago, necrovore said:

    Although nature follows laws, these laws are averages, and there are always sources of noise. The gas laws for example arise from the random motions of innumerable particles. They are an average. There's no way any conscious could "know" the positions and velocities of all those particles. The amount of information is too big, even without accounting for "quantum weirdness."

    Knowing the existence of, and disregard for, noise is the fundamental achievement of Galilean science. “Noise” is essentially the epistemological filter that stands between God and man, necessary when dealing with vast amounts of unknown such as molecules in a gas. Only God can do the computation with infinite precision. Man can handle smaller amounts of data in circumstances where we know the relevant data, which we don’t always, cf. Neptune and Pluto. The classic perspective is that the laws of physics are absolute, and not statistical approximations ± some degree of randomness, although more-practical laws dealing with large-scale structures such as the ideal gas law are approximations. Not because the universe is inherently “non-deterministic”, but because it’s impractical to construct a particle-physics level model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment. Non-determinism was classically an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical one.

    Things changed with Heisenberg’s argument that God plays with dice. I never really understood the leap of reasoning from “we can’t predict” to “there is no law”, until I thought about what physical laws are. It is generally held that the laws of physics are a fundamental aspect of the universe, that they are real and not just human conveniences. Objectivism interjects an important distinction between epistemology and metaphysics, saying that there is Existence, and has a definite nature independent of consciousness. A grasp of Existence – by a consciousness – gives rise to “fact”, a perceivable aspect of Existence. There is a commonplace observation in anthropology that classification of existents into natural types is seemingly random cultural influences. As English-speaking westerners we feel that our concept “snake” is absolutely correct, there really is a universal snakeness to snakes which we perceive. But other cultures and languages have different principles of classification, where a certain animal is also “a type of snake”, e.g. Ophisaurus which are not taxonomically snakes, but in many cultures are lumped together with snakes; or certain species of Typhlops which are snakes but in some cultures are classified as worms. The cultural aspect that yields these differences of classification is focus. Standard Western classification focuses on evolution of species, but local folk taxonomies focus on immediately-perceivable morphological similarity or utility.

    The “laws of nature” are epistemological by nature, in that they grasp the nature of existence. The error that arises in discussions of ‘determinism’ is not being clear on what ‘determinism’ is. Determinism, properly understood, is a claim not about existence, it is a claim about Man, that we have the capacity to fully grasp every fact. I’m not opposed to that premise, I just think that it is important to say more precisely what “determinism” is. Non-determinism refers to aspects of existence which we cannot know.

    Of course, the other half of the discussion is being clearer about what “free will” is.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 1 hour ago, EC said:

    David, aren't you a linguist?

    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.

  5. 23 hours ago, EC said:

    Gus has been running the table (forum) lately with his blogging.

    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?

  6. 3 hours ago, Reidy said:

    This is easy to test. See if rates in the US are lower a year from now.

    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.

     

     

  7. 2 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

    One question this raises is, are there countries where government interference forces commission rates wrongfully low?

    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.

  8. 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...

  9. 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.

  10. 9 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

    Should we have laws protecting children from foods containing unhealthy amounts of sugar or salt?  How do we define "unhealthy"?  Should we have laws limiting children's access to over the counter drugs?  To pornography?  To violent fiction?  Should we get into arguments about what ideas could be harmful to children?

    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?

  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. 2 hours ago, necrovore said:

    If this is an Objectivist forum then it should practice the Objectivist epistemology.

    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. 2 hours ago, necrovore said:

    There can be options in concept formation

    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.

  16. Okay, so your metric of government size is in terms of absolute dollars spent. I submit, then, that your use of the word “now” is less accurate than the alternative expression “for a very long time”, though the Wiki data only goes back 10 years.

     

    2 hours ago, necrovore said:

    In theory but not necessarily in practice. Who is in charge of enforcing these laws? Who watches the watchers?

    Let’s take a simpler case: who is in charge of enforcing laws against murder or theft? There is not a single answer (even setting aside the jurisdiction matter). The police may actually implement force to arrest and detain a suspect, but the individual officer does so by following objective procedural rules spelled out by their superior (the chief of police). The chief of police is (usually) appointed by the elected mayor, though a sheriff may be elected. Apart from arrest power, there is prosecution power, which is held by a different government employee, perhaps a hired city attorney (subordinate to the mayor) or an elected prosecuting attorney. Actual enforcement is the product of a further step, a trial which involves a cabal of civilians who decide certain facts, lawyers who make arguments, and judges who procedurally oversee the interaction between lawyers + witnesses and jurors. The judge may be appointed or elected, depending on level. At the state level, higher level judges (justices) tend to be elected and trial judges tend to be appointed by a cabal of superiors). Ultimately a judge gets to decide what the law says regarding the force to be used in a case, and other judges above him get to decide whether he has correctly applied the law. If upheld, the judge orders another agency to use force (for example haul his ass to prison and keep him there for 10 years). In short, what is enforcement.

    In no system of government is there a guaranteed mechanism for compliance with the law. In the US system, any person who has been wronged can appeal to the judicial system, and you can have your day (week, month) in court. The courts fail not because the courts are corrupt and unsupervised dispensers of justice, but because the elected creators of law are on average unprincipled evil bastards, which is because they are elected by a popularity contest that has no discernible relationship to a real political issue. The media will be happy to declare some spurious cause-effect relation so that if the Republicans lose a few seats and the Democrats win a majority in the three elected federal sub-parts, where will be plenty of post hoc analysis lacking any rational basis in reality. At most it will amount to the emotional reaction “I hate Trump”. Or, “I hate Biden”. (Admittedly, Trump stepped out in a surprising way last time with his “Build the wall” promise, I don’t expect to see any concrete issues in House and Senate races, recalling that it is the House and Senate that write the laws and POTUS that enforces them).

    At the federal level, the “watcher” is POTUS, who is empowered to command enforcement of the law. The voters are the watchers of the watcher, and generally speaking I don’t think that those higher-order watchers are doing a very good job (they have no idea what the watcher- and commander-in-chief is actually ordering to be done). POTUS commands a secretary to enforce a particular law in a specific way, you get to comment on the announced plan for enforcement, if you’d like. The real problem with law enforcement at the federal level is the interpretive deference rule known as “Chevron deference” which holds that the governments interpretation of the law is presumed to be correct, unless it is plainly incorrect. It remains to be seen, and not soon enough, what if anything will remain of that doctrine.

    I still don’t understand that this notion of a “permanent government” refers to. Dollars spent? Number of employees? Subjective law?

  17. 28 minutes ago, necrovore said:

    The US now has the largest government ever in world history.

    First: do you have a factual basis for that claim (I assume you're not just intuiting what you think reality is) – gimme a number, and what nation has the second largest government? Second, are you claiming that the fact of having many government employees establishes that we have a "permanent government"? As far as I can see, this is just a right-wing meme, the counterpart of the left-wing meme "The Man". Every nation has some substantial set of employees which doesn't get traded out every two of four years. I'm just trying to understand what this invention "permanent government" even means.

    Law provides checks on the power of government employees. The problem is not with employee tenure or the fact that federal janitors are un-elected, it is the scope of government in the first place. It is the minimally-fettered power of a few hundred federal lawmakers to actually make those laws (and the also minimally-fettered of the various tens or hundreds of of thousands or state and municipal lawmakers to make lower-level laws), that is the source of "the problem".

    Evidence is strong that Mayorkas is not part of some permanent government: he was first appointed 3 years ago, and at most could serve another 5 years. It seems to me that the word "permanent" in this meme "permanent government" is redundant, people just mean "the government", though specifically "the government that I disagree with".

  18. OO is supposed to serve a particular purpose, which is not the same as the purpose of Twit-Face or alt.philosophy.objectivism and its spawn HPO, if you remember them. When content deviates from that purpose, it is right for management to take corrective action. My judgment is that adherence to that purpose here is not strict, and it has gotten much looser since I first joined about 20 years ago.

    Every person who contributes here should be able to articulate their justification for contributing, to say what value you receive in exchange for your posts. If you can’t do that, you should re-evaluate your self-sacrifice. In fact, very many former contributors have done so (by which I mean, the vast majority). There are loose guidelines which state what the purpose of OO is and what contributors should and should not do. Intellectual honesty is one of those requirements, the problem is that intellectual dishonesty comes in many flavors, one being evasion and the other being unreasoned reliance on authoritative statements. The covid thread reeks of evasion and was worthy of closing on those grounds. I concluded that there was no rational value to be had in the thread, and that put paid to my participation there. I might, in another incarnation, contemplate whether just leaving the thread open does any harm.

    There have been many fora for Objectivism, most of which have fallen into complete inactivity. When you peruse the content of other Objectivist fora, ask yourself if you would want to be associated with that group and if not, why not? My judgment is, “No: crappy content” (NB this explicitly does not refer to HBL). The potential harm of crappy content to Objectivism should be obvious, so now we know the basis for closing crappy threads, what remains is a specific evaluation of one or more threads, to decide if they are overall above that crappiness threshold (I will not engage in a specific autopsy here). I would like to avoid reaching the “crappy content” conclusion w.r.t. OO.

  19. I am curious about this notion of a “permanent government” in the US. Now we know that Lukashenko has been the absolute ruler of Belarus ever since it separated from the Soviet Union, Putin been has ruler of Russia de jure or de facto since 1999. Many African nations have been ruled by single absolute rulers for decades, e.g. Equatorial Guinea, China is controlled by a de facto permanent ruler. Iran and Burma are essentially run by permanent councils / juntas with an irrelevant figurehead. In the US, OTOH, we change president relatively often, and Congressmen individually last about 4 terms in the House and 2 terms in the Senate though there are individuals who last for decades. Of course, the federal appellate judicature is composed of life appointees.

    Clearly, this permanent government of which you speak isn’t composed of the executive, legislative or, realistically the judiciary. What I’d like to know is, what or who is this permanent government in the US? I suppose you might be talking of career military and civil service employees. In what sense to the various park rangers, TSA agents, clerks in the bureaucracy, embassy grunts and so on constitute a government? And if you aren’t speaking of the clerks and cops, who are you speaking of? In what was was this supposed government “disrupted” by Trump (and how was that disruption not exactly the same as the “disruption” created by the Carter-Reagan, Bush-Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush-Obama or Trump-Biden transitions)? Is this government distinct from the shadow world government run by the Illuminati?

  20. Separately, let me address the rational thought / rights question. “Rights” derive from man’s nature: our proper means of survival is reason, not e.g. superior force as in the case of lions. More specifically, man’s actions are chosen, not automatic / metaphysically given, and man uses reason to devise a moral code guiding his choices. “Rights” are a part of that moral code specifically devised for existence in a society, that is, when we live together through voluntary trade (the natural outgrowth of living cooperatively in a society).

    An alien species might well have aspects of the faculty of reason yet be compelled to survive by superior force, hence the fictitious Kzinti. In the Man-Kzin Wars novels the cats seem to be in an evolutionary middle stage, that they have language and space ships but cannot freely resist the compulsion to kill and eat. The human concept of rights and surrender of the use of force for survival to government monopoly is simply not applicable to a Kzin. The connection between language, the faculty of reason, and the concept of rights as applied to humans does not come from the ability to group individuals together under concepts, or to form communicative propositions, and it does not come from the fact that we can perform logical computations like “If A then B; A is true; Then it follows that B is true”. Rather, it follows from the fact that we can freely chose our actions, and that we can survive using our wits rather than our claws.

     

  21. Professionally speaking, (*sigh*). This animal language nonsense apparently will never go away.

    The first relevant division in cognition that has to be made is between “symbol” and “concept”. Very simple organisms with nervous systems can at least respond to physical stimuli. We don’t know anything significant about bug-cognition, but we do know that honeybees have the ability to communicate information about good (via an iconic dance, where the signal is directly related to the message (direction and distance). When we get to birds and mammals, people increase their metaphorical talk about “language” (though they say the same thing about bees and in fact in extremely metaphorical cases, about inanimate objects). There is a fair amount of evidence that some birds and mammals have something along the lines of “self-awareness”, thus they utter the message “Me. Me. Me”. There is a lot of variation in the form of the message, so that the signal may be stored and repeated for a short while (i.e. “today” or “this season”), or maybe longer terms. This is simple a label a name.

    Humans have a unique ability, which is to for concepts, which is (first) the mental grouping together of existents defined on some perceptible basis and (second) a label attached to that grouping. Thus we have in English the words “dog”, “cat”, “rat”, “mammal”, and “animal”, each of which refers to a different thing. We use these discrete labels to communicate to others. Concepts can be formed by grouping other concepts together, to form a new concept (mammal, animal, pet, etc). The various labels can be combined into sentences which communicate propositions. Sequences of propositions can be organized into “reasoning”, as exemplified by Atlas Shrugged and ITOE.

    The ability to self-identify is not the same as having a rational faculty. Even the ability to learn to group immediately-evident classes of existents under a communicable label is not the same as having a rational faculty, and there is no evidence that dolphins or apes have even that rudimentary capacity. The “signal complexity” claim is a red herring. What is lacking is evidence for discrete generalizability and combinability. Words of human language are made of cognitively-discrete combinable sound units, like “k”, “s”, “i”, “m” and so on, but the physical reality is continuous modulation of an acoustic waveform. (That cognitive fact is why we can write with distinct letters to represent the infinitude of physical symbols). The whale/dolphin language-advocates have yet to establish that the emited waveforms of those animals have an analogous cognitive status: construction of complex structures built on concatenation of cognitively discrete units which are realised as physical continua. We have known for a century that bee dance superficially looks complex because there are very many possible signals, but they don’t reduce to complex and structured combinations of atomic units.

    Us linguists object to misusing the word “language” to refer to things that aren’t language, like “the language of music”, or talking of DNA as being a kind of “language”. You can call the laws of physics the “language of reality”, but it ain’t a language. Abstraction and recursive structure build on lower-level abstractions is the essential feature of human language, and no animals on Earth have it, other than the rational animal.

  22. 1 hour ago, necrovore said:

    The idea is for the jury to be representative of the country (or at least the voters), not the defendant, and such "representativeness" implies that if the country is 50% Democrat then juries should be 50% Democrat (on average), that sort of thing.

    I see. Well, I am not a fan of competing jurisdictions, there ought to be fundamental unity in the political and legal system, where individual rights are protected irrespective of where you live. By eliminating municipalities and states as political entities, we would go a long ways towards a system of government that protects the rights of individuals rather than the ‘rights’ of states. But even so, that raises a (potentially surmountable) problem with juries and trials, that trials have to take place in a specific geographical location.

    An unbiased random selection of 12 individuals from the US population would on average yield 60% white jurors, 19% Hispanic, 12% black and 6% Asian, also roughly an even distribution of males and females; 10% without complete high school education, 18% with graduate degrees, about the same number with just a bachelor’s degree etc. Also about 35% Protestants, 13% Catholics, a fraction of Jews and Mormons, and no discernible number for actual hard-core atheists. Other demographic properties include type of employment and income or wealth level, also the urban / rural divide. We can include political affiliation and sub-affiliation (MAGA, RINO etc).

    The only demographic property that seems to be reasonably geography-neutral is sex (biological, not orientation or self-identification). The number of Republicans in Washington state is way below whatever you think the national average is, and it seems to be the opposite in Texas. Texas and Georgia have the highest Black populations, Wyoming and Montana have the lowest. Unbiased random sampling can never achieve national-representativeness as long as juries are geographically-based. It might actually be possible at some point to dispense with local juries, but right now that would be such a huge technological clusterfuck that it should not even be considered briefly. And so, we are necessarily stuck with juries that are unrepresentative of the nation (notice that I didn’t even mention demographic quotas as a scheme to reach representativeness, except to point out that it is an even worse idea). Rather than seeking demographically ‘representative’ juries, we should be seeking objective juries who will apply the law to the facts, rather than advocating along ideological lines. Jury-tainting can arise when local tabloids exercise their First Amendment right to declare the unconvicted to be guilty so maybe a venue-change is a solution, more likely these days it would solve nothing because media-generated prejudice is nationwide, and there is no event that you can point to when you have a long-term KKK-favoring population in a county that would justify a change of venue. There simply are no neutral venues.

    An alternative to the current unqualified juror problem is to develop a better system of voire dire, to identify individuals who are willing to actually apply the law rather than reach an ideologically-driven conclusion. Foreign-born people who want to become US citizens have to pass a fairly trivial civics quiz, which native-born individuals do not have to pass. We could devise better jury-qualification standards.

  23. 44 minutes ago, necrovore said:

    I'd say it's a bad idea to get rid of juries, because of something about government having to be based upon the "consent of the governed."

    The well-known problem with the “consent of the governed” argument is that laws are not created by the consent of the governed, they are created by individuals who voted for a particular lawmaker who voted in an assembly with a bunch of other representatives – we don’t directly consent to laws (with a few rare examples in a few western states). Applying “consent of the governed” thinking to criminal trials, judges themselves should be eliminated and replaced with the judgment of “the governed”. The accused is one of “the governed”, but there is no requirement that they consent to being tried. And surely you have heard arguments to the effect that “by living in this society, you implicitly consent to abide by its rules”. That is utter nonsense, it perverts the concept of consent. Rather, if you chose to live in a society, you know that violation of the laws of that society will have consequences. The question that remains, a question that Objectivism has an answer to, is “what are the proper laws of a rational society”?

    There are two senses of “representative”. Formally, a “representative” is an individual who purports to speak for you in a law-making ritual (legislative session). There is no implication that the person elected to be your representative shares any of your beliefs or cares about your interests. We have a procedure for deeming that a given person is your “representative”, based on geography. The other popular sense is the completely subjective “looks like me” sense, that some individual may share with you beliefs, interests, race, religion, hobbies or whatever.

    There is no rational basis for requiring jurors to be representative of the accused in the subjective “look like the accused” sense (I can’t even imagnie what it would mean to have ‘representative’ jurors in the ‘voted for’ sense, the concept makes me shudder). The jury selection process does work in favor of a defendant who is most like the general population in a trial venue, which is not a good thing. This worked in favor of the accused in cases of racist murders of Blacks in the south in the 60’s, where all of the murderer’s neighbors had the same view as the accused, so they did not consent to convicting and punishing the murderers. Demographics changed over the years, so now in a few cases the populace has finally consented to punish rights-violators.

    Fairness is not determined by demographic similarity of the dispensers of justice and the accused, or victim. Fairness is about dispassionate application of an objectively-stated moral code to the facts at hand. By training and temperment, a triumvirate of judges is better able to reach an objective conclusion than a dozen street-recruits. Consent of the governed is irrelevant to the question of fairness.

  24. On 2/27/2024 at 5:23 PM, tadmjones said:

    A reasonable reading of the situation , one hopefully provided by a prospective jury, should conclude that their intent was not that a blatant forgery would not be uncovered and the plot would by itself subvert the results of the presidential election.

    I can’t decide if I agree or disagree, because we are talking about a fundamental contradiction baked into the legal system. The function of law in a proper society is to narrowly limit the use of force, following objective moral principles articulated by the government of that society. The function of the juror is to decide whether the accused has in fact breached those principles in a specific way. It is in the nature of objective law that conviction is for a specific prohibited act, and not for a general evil character, and it is part of the law that you convict only under specific circumstances, you do not convict because you subjectively believe that the person is evil (nor acquit because you feel that they are virtuous).

    Under the law, the jury / a juror is not to provide a ‘reading of the situation’, they are to carefully scrutinize the data admitted by the court into the record, from which they draw a logical conclusion – a yes or no answer to a specific question asked by the court. “Are you persuaded that on this data, this person performed this specific prohibited act, having this specific intent?”. They are not to invent testimony not actually offered or to create arguments not actually proffered, they are simply to decide whether they are persuaded by the prosecution or not, based on the record.

    This being a specific intent crime, the defense could just advance a version of the political theater argument, if the goal is to prevent conviction (assuming these are not sacrificial animals on trial). If the defense does not advance the myriad arguments that those were purely symbolic political acts, a juror could still decide that the defendants are virtuous therefore should not be convicted for their acts, and could decide to change function from neutral evaluator of the facts to partisan advocate for one side. Jury nullification is always an option, and the only cure for jurors subjectively ignoring the law is to eliminate trial by jury (maybe not a bad idea, but a huge change in the US legal system requiring constitutional amendment). In civil law systems, (professional) judges are unbiased finders of fact, not supervisors of process and interpreters of statutory meaning.

    Under the law, jurors do not construct defense counter-arguments, they evaluate prosecution arguments, asking whether they possess reason (facts and argumentation) to doubt the prosecution’s argument. Hopefully, the defense will provide such reasons for doubt, and not leave it to the subjective whims of a biased juror. However, the formalism of law is quite defective (in this case the legislature has provided no legal definition of ‘forgery’ or ‘falsely’ for certificates of ascertainment), hence the juror must make up his own definition – unless the judge sua sponte cooks up his own definition.

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