1) What kind of dinner party was this? It’s great to expose non-rigorous beliefs, but was that the right place to show off your superiority? It seems you came off as having some inferiority complex, though obviously I wasn’t there. I know that if I’m at a party (of most types), for example, my first goal ain’t exactly to win philosophical arguments …
2) Why did you have to involve Aumann’s theorem? You caught him in a contradiction. The question of whether people can agree to disagree, at least it seems to me, is an unnecessary distraction. And for all he knows, you could just be making that up to intimidate him. And Aumann’s Theorem certainly doesn’t imply that, at any given moment, rectifying that particularly inconsistency is an optimal use of someone’s time.
3) It seems what he was really trying to say was someting along the lines of “while you could make an intelligence, its emotions would not be real the way humans’ are”. (“Submarines aren’t really swimming.”) I probably would have at least attempted to verify if that’s what he meant rather latching onto the most ridiculous meaning I could find.
4) I’ve had the same experience with people who fervently hold beliefs but don’t consider tests that could falsify them. In my case, it’s usually with people who insist that the true rate of inflation in the US is ~12%, all the time. I always ask, “so what basket of commodity futures can I buy that consistently makes 12% nominal?”
To point 4 and inflation, the trick is to not invest in commodity futures (where the deflationary pressures of improved production technology cancel some of the inflationary pressures of currency devaluation) but rather assets. You can invest in the S&P 500 and achieve ~11% nominal returns. Now whether asset prices are relevant to “inflation” is dependent upon whether you are trying to answer the question of “how many apples could I buy for a dollar in 1960 versus today?” or the question “how many apples could I buy for a dollar today if they were produced with the same inputs and technological process as they were in 1960?”
A few questions and comments:
1) What kind of dinner party was this? It’s great to expose non-rigorous beliefs, but was that the right place to show off your superiority? It seems you came off as having some inferiority complex, though obviously I wasn’t there. I know that if I’m at a party (of most types), for example, my first goal ain’t exactly to win philosophical arguments …
2) Why did you have to involve Aumann’s theorem? You caught him in a contradiction. The question of whether people can agree to disagree, at least it seems to me, is an unnecessary distraction. And for all he knows, you could just be making that up to intimidate him. And Aumann’s Theorem certainly doesn’t imply that, at any given moment, rectifying that particularly inconsistency is an optimal use of someone’s time.
3) It seems what he was really trying to say was someting along the lines of “while you could make an intelligence, its emotions would not be real the way humans’ are”. (“Submarines aren’t really swimming.”) I probably would have at least attempted to verify if that’s what he meant rather latching onto the most ridiculous meaning I could find.
4) I’ve had the same experience with people who fervently hold beliefs but don’t consider tests that could falsify them. In my case, it’s usually with people who insist that the true rate of inflation in the US is ~12%, all the time. I always ask, “so what basket of commodity futures can I buy that consistently makes 12% nominal?”
To point 4 and inflation, the trick is to not invest in commodity futures (where the deflationary pressures of improved production technology cancel some of the inflationary pressures of currency devaluation) but rather assets. You can invest in the S&P 500 and achieve ~11% nominal returns. Now whether asset prices are relevant to “inflation” is dependent upon whether you are trying to answer the question of “how many apples could I buy for a dollar in 1960 versus today?” or the question “how many apples could I buy for a dollar today if they were produced with the same inputs and technological process as they were in 1960?”