For the libertarians, wouldn’t you, like Friedman, prefer a basic income guarantee to the paternalistic regulatory state?
Asked in this form, this is a request for collecting information about distribution of opinions in the form of a few self-filtered anecdotes. The data thus collected is completely useless, so it might be better to look for data collected elsewhere or by other means.
Suppose then that we do collect such data. In what way would it be useful for the purpose of a theoretical discussion? Opinions themselves may be hard to interpret: different meanings may be intended by the same simplified statement (e.g. one policy may be “preferred” if it magically worked reliably, but a different one may be “preferred” to be actually attempted given the knowledge of how reliably various policies work); the reasons for people holding an opinion may not be indicative of properties of the referents of those opinions (due to errors in reasoning like cultural status quo). Also, opinions (conclusions) are not the best form of data for the purpose of discussing properties of various policies (which would be the basis for making decisions/conclusions).
I think it’s best to avoid questions or declarations of opinion in either overly imprecise form (that would permit significantly different interpretations), or about conclusions that depend on many unclear considerations that should themselves be under discussion. A discussion should go forward from understandable facts to conclusions, not the other way around, from conclusions reached in an unknown manner, to justification of those conclusions.
Asked in this form, this is a request for collecting information about distribution of opinions in the form of a few self-filtered anecdotes. The data thus collected is completely useless,
Suppose then that we do collect such data. In what way would it be useful for the purpose of a theoretical discussion?
No, the data is not completely useless. Limited sampling of a distribution can give you information about the different clusters in the distribution, if not the relative frequency of samples in those clusters.
There are only so many basic arguments for a position. I wanted to see if the clever folks here had one I hadn’t heard before.
I was making a distinction between arguments for a position and statements of a position. The words “asked in this form” in my comment referred to the way you phrased the question, which was as stated about positions and not arguments. Thankfully, the responses were mostly about arguments, although a couple of them opened with statements of positions, which was the unhelpful bit, whose flaws were the topic of my comment.
(Nice point about limited biased samples being adequate for discovering clusters. It seems that this way you may form non-hopeless hypotheses with much less effort than is necessary to quantitatively judge them.)
I see now what you were getting at. Yes, the question as posed to libertarians lacked the request for “why” that my question to liberals did.
As was likely apparent, the libertarian question was an add on to the question to liberals. I’m much more familiar with the basic premises of people who call themselves libertarian, and consider it unlikely that too many libertarians would prefer the hyper regulatory state, though I could make a libertarian argument for it versus the pure redistributionist welfare state.
I was mainly interested in what those crazy liberals are thinking, because what they advocate doesn’t actually effectively fulfill what they say they want. IMO.
Asked in this form, this is a request for collecting information about distribution of opinions in the form of a few self-filtered anecdotes. The data thus collected is completely useless, so it might be better to look for data collected elsewhere or by other means.
Suppose then that we do collect such data. In what way would it be useful for the purpose of a theoretical discussion? Opinions themselves may be hard to interpret: different meanings may be intended by the same simplified statement (e.g. one policy may be “preferred” if it magically worked reliably, but a different one may be “preferred” to be actually attempted given the knowledge of how reliably various policies work); the reasons for people holding an opinion may not be indicative of properties of the referents of those opinions (due to errors in reasoning like cultural status quo). Also, opinions (conclusions) are not the best form of data for the purpose of discussing properties of various policies (which would be the basis for making decisions/conclusions).
I think it’s best to avoid questions or declarations of opinion in either overly imprecise form (that would permit significantly different interpretations), or about conclusions that depend on many unclear considerations that should themselves be under discussion. A discussion should go forward from understandable facts to conclusions, not the other way around, from conclusions reached in an unknown manner, to justification of those conclusions.
No, the data is not completely useless. Limited sampling of a distribution can give you information about the different clusters in the distribution, if not the relative frequency of samples in those clusters.
There are only so many basic arguments for a position. I wanted to see if the clever folks here had one I hadn’t heard before.
I was making a distinction between arguments for a position and statements of a position. The words “asked in this form” in my comment referred to the way you phrased the question, which was as stated about positions and not arguments. Thankfully, the responses were mostly about arguments, although a couple of them opened with statements of positions, which was the unhelpful bit, whose flaws were the topic of my comment.
(Nice point about limited biased samples being adequate for discovering clusters. It seems that this way you may form non-hopeless hypotheses with much less effort than is necessary to quantitatively judge them.)
I see now what you were getting at. Yes, the question as posed to libertarians lacked the request for “why” that my question to liberals did.
As was likely apparent, the libertarian question was an add on to the question to liberals. I’m much more familiar with the basic premises of people who call themselves libertarian, and consider it unlikely that too many libertarians would prefer the hyper regulatory state, though I could make a libertarian argument for it versus the pure redistributionist welfare state.
I was mainly interested in what those crazy liberals are thinking, because what they advocate doesn’t actually effectively fulfill what they say they want. IMO.