Kratoklastes

Karma: −169

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 12:22 UTC
−10 points
in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
Hey there AriKatsaris… So we’re move back up here now—with Katsaris the Morally-Unimpeachable taking full advantage of the highly-biased comment-response system (which prevents people from responding to Katsaris’ gibberish directly unless they have sufficiently fellated the ruling clique here). And “downvoting without comment”—apart from being so babyish that it qualifies for child support - enables something of an attempt to control the dialogue.

Eventually we will get to he nub, which is that Katsaris the Morally-Unimpeachable thinks that the State is necessary (of course without ever having examined what his betters throughout history have thought about the issue—reading the literature is for lesser mortals): in other words, he has no understanding whatsoever of the dynamic consequences of the paradigm to which he subscribes.

Dishonesty takes many forms, young Aris: first and foremost is claiming expertise in a discipline in which you’re an ignoramus. Legally it’s referred to as “misleading and deceptive conduct” to attempt to pass yourself off as an expert in a field in which you have no training: compensation only happens if there had been a contract that relied on your economic expertise, of course… we can be thankful that’s not the case, however the overarching principle is that claiming to be an expert when you’re not is dishonest—the legal sanction is subsidiary to the moral wrong.

Secondly, it is dishonest to perform actions for reasons other than those that you give as justifications. Your Euro-fearmongering and Islamophobia (the Harris-Hitchens “We can bomb the brown folks coz some of them are evil” nonsense) mark you out as someone who has staunch political views, and those inform your decisions (your stated reasons are windows-dressing—and hence dishonest).

You practice misdirection all the time. Again, dishonest.

You’re innumerate, too. That’s not a mark of dishonesty, it’s just a sign of someone who does not have the tools to be a decent analyst of anything.

We can do this for as long as you like: right up until you have to go stand in line for the next outburst of sub-moronic schlock from J K Rowling, if you like.

EDIT: some more stuff, just to clarify...

Here’s the thing: I don’t expect Aris “I Don’t Need to Read the Literature Before I Bloviate” Katsaris (the Morally-Unimpeachable) to have a sudden epiphany, renounce all the nonsense he believes, and behave like an adult.

What I expect to happen is that over time a small self-regarding clique will change their behaviour—because unless it changes, this site will be even more useless than it now is, and right now it’s pretty bad. Not Scientology bad, but close enough to be well outside any sensible definition of ‘rational’, and heading in the wrong direction.

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 11:37 UTC
−11 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
Yeah, so I’ll just leave this here… (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of ‘correct line’ cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in… ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared “China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe” irrational fearmonger).

Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you’re also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.

If you can’t read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you’re just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn’t have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it (“I haven’t read Coase”… “I haven’t read Rand”… “I haven’t read anything on existentialism”… “Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?”).

You’re a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.

Wait—don’t tell me… you aren’t aware of their work. Google it.

Here’s the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your ‘net’ Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who’s not a retard thinks it’s worth doing.

And the big problem you face is that I don’t give a toss what number my ‘karma’ winds up at: this is the internet.

I’ve been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I’ve been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).

You do NOT want this war: you’re not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You’re a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.

You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai… and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.

Ga Muti. (or Ka muti if you prefer a hard gamma).

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 2:55 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Morality is Awesome

It’s you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren’t important ones.

A sentence can be important without being the complete rendition of one’s views on a topic: you’re being dishonest (again).

Seriously, if you spent as much mental effort on bringing yourself up to speed with core concepts as you do on misdirection and trying to be everyone’s schoolmarm, the community (for which you obviously purport to speak) would be better off.

I note that you didn’t bleat like a retarded sheep and nitpick the idea to which I was responding, namely that morality was about maximising global awesomeness (or some other such straight-line-to-tyranny). No demand for a definitions of terms, no babble about how that won’t do for coding your make-believe AI, no gabble about expression.

And last but not least—given that you’ve already exhibited ‘bounded literacy’: what gives you the right to judge anybody?

I’m not going demand that we compare academic transcripts—you don’t have a hope on that metric—just some indication apart from “I feel strongly about this” will suffice. Preferably one that doesn’t confuse the second person possessive with the second person (present tense) of the verb “to be”.

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 2:41 UTC
−7 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
“Your [sic] being downvoted”,,, hilarious: you’re showing the world that you can’t write an English sentence—which is hilarious given your prior waffle about “the precise meaning and consequences of [] words”.

Pretend it was a typo (which just happened to be the “you’re/your” issue, which is second to “then/than”, with “loose/lose” in third, as a marker of a bad second-rate education).

Make sure you go back and cover your tracks: you can edit your comments to remove glaring indications of a lack of really fundamental literacy. Already screencapped it anyhow.

That’s worth an upvote, for the pleasure it has brought me today.

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 2:30 UTC
−8 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
Oh please… what sad, sophomoric nonsense. “Down-votes” are for children: In my entire life on the internet (beginning in 1993) I’ve never down-voted anything in my whole life—anywhere—because down-votes are for self-indulgent babies who are obsessed with having some miniscule, irrelevant punitive capacity. It’s the ultimate expression of weakness.

Key point: if you have never read Coase—a fundamental (arguably the fundamental) contribution to the literature on nuisance-abatement in economics and the law—then you’re starting from a handicap so great that you can’t even participate sensibly in a discussion of the concept, because (here’s the thing...) it starts with Coase. It would be like involving yourself in an argument about optimal control, then bridling at being expected to have heard of calculus.

You brought the Coase issue into play it by implicitly asserting that that the “willingness-to-pay-to-abate” idea was mine—showing that you were gapingly ignorant of a massive literature in Economics that bears directly on the point.

While we’re being middle-school debaters, I will point out that your paraphrase should properly have been “Letting people do as they will as long as they are not imposing costs on others” (don’t mis-paraphrase my paraphrase: it’s either sloppy or dishonest—or both).

But let’s look at that statement: what bit of that would preclude the right to hire gangs to do violence to a peaceful individual? The bit about imposing costs maybe?

And nonsense like “That’s your argument, but you don’t even know it” is simply ludicrous—it’s such a hackneyed device that it’s almost not worth responding to.

Let’s just say that right through to Masters level I had no difficulty in making clear what my arguments were (I dropped out of my PhD once my scholarship ran out), and nothing has changed in the interim. Maybe you’re just so much smarter than the folks who graded me, and thus have spotted flaws that they missed. All while never having had to stoop to read Coase. Astounding hubris.

Another thing: the people of Iran do not contribute willingly to the funding of their state. That was not even a straw man argument—it was more like the ashes of a particularly sad already-burned straw man, that was made by a kid from the short bus.

Now some Iranians might be perfectly willing to fund State terror (just as some Americans are happy to fund drone strikes on Yemeni children) - ask yourself what budget there would be for the ‘religious police’ in Iran if the payment of taxes was entirely voluntary. The whole thing about a State is that it specifically denies expression of individual preference on issues of importance to the ruling clique: war, state ideology, internal policing, and revenue-collection.

I am amused that you used Iran as the boogie-man du jour, given that Iran actually has no purpose-specific “religious police”. The Saudi mutaween are far more famous, and their brief is specifically and solely to enforce Shari’a. The Iranian government has VEVAK (internal security forces, who do not police religious issues) and the Basij—the Basij does some enforcement of dress codes, but apart from that they’re nowhere near the level of oppression as in Saudi Arabia, and do not exist specifically to enforce religious doctrine (unike the mutaween).

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 1:27 UTC
−10 points
in reply to: Kawoomba’s comment on: Closet survey #1
It’s been some time since I checked the standard style manuals: is there really a stated style for emphasis in comments on the internet? It would not surprise me too much—there are a lot of people with too much time on their hands, who like telling others what to do (and the less important the sphere of endeavour, the more urgent the need to be boss of it). [Oh, and apologies in advance for not using em-dashes...]

As to whether you “d[id] that right”, it depends. Reading it back to myself, it would appear not. Try all-caps on the bold bits and see if it makes sense hen you read it out loud… then do the same for the material to which you took stylistic objection and see if that makes sense.

As to Goebells: that specific example really needed to be in there, since he made clear that he admired Bernays (and the American eugenics movement). Born-against-Christians are the handiest example of indoctrination.

I don’t know what “applause lights” are: doubtless some egregious thing that is so important that it merited a new jargonistic term for the [meta]cognoscenti to use to beat us ‘mundanes’. (What does the style manual say about italicising Italian words on the internet?)

LBNL: if you don’t think that there is a clique here who is, quite specifically, “march[ing] [their] little soldier arguments”, I think you have not been paying attention. It’s as bad as coming across a coven of Randians, and almost as correct-line as the Freepers (the trolling of Freepers is one of life’s little joys).

The sort of people who say “Your entire theory of life and morals is incomplete and would bee useless for programming an AI” in response to a 21-word phrase at the end of a comment which did not purport to be exhaustive or complete, and was never put forward as a candidate for coding an AI.

Also the sort of people who say “What you said doesn’t make sense to me, so you must be wrong and not know what you’re talking about” while revealing gaping holes in their understanding of early-undergraduate material that is absolutely central to the issue at hand.

I’ve taught people like that—usually at first year level: people who throw about words like “utilitarian” and “consequentialist”, while steadfastly ignoring the long-term consequences of the system they are advocating (or implicitly supporting) and attacking anybody they view as ideologically impure. It’s hilarious.

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 1:04 UTC
−9 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
Again ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I’ma put it here...

In short your description of what morality entails isn’t sufficient, isn’t complete

It was a comment—not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a “description of what morality entails”.

To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter’s entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess—if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.

Here’s something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a “description of what morality entails”, it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)

Kratoklastes 11 Jan 2013 0:37 UTC
−11 points
in reply to: Kratoklastes’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
This one’s for you, ArisKatsaris—the “correct-line-ometer” prevents me from responding directly to your response, so I’ma put it here.

I have checked what I wrote, and nowhere did I write that the (well understood) Coase-style arguments about how to ameliorate nuisances, had anything to do with morality. They are something that any half-decent second-year Economics student has to know, on pain of failing an important module in second-year Microeconomics: it would be as near to impossible as makes no odds, to get better than a credit for 2nd year Micro without having read and understood Coase. So if you think I made it up from whole cloth, I suggest you’ve missed a critical bit of theory.

So anyhow… if you want to go around interpolating things that aren’t there, well and good—it might pass muster in Sociology departments (assuming universities still have those), but it’s not going to advance the ball any.

As to ‘hiring thugs to beat up people who engage in’ [insert behaviour here]… well, that seems a perfect analysis of what the State does to people who disagree with it: since I advocate the non-aggression principle, I would certainly never support such a thing (but let’s say I did: at least I would not be extorting the money used to pay for it).

This is a funny place—similar to a Randian cult-centre with its correct-line “persentio ergo rectum” clique and salon-intellectualism.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 22:30 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: How to Disentangle the Past and the Future
Not generalising in the least: I’m a man of the people who interacts often with the common man—particularly the rustic and bucolic variety (from the Auvergne in Deepest Darkest France to the dusty hinterland of rural Victora and New South Wales).

Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve had conversations about animals (most of which I’ve initiated, I admit—and most of them before I went veggie), with folks ranging from French eleveurs de boeuf to Melbourne barristers and stock analysts: their lack of awareness of the complexity of animal sense organs (and their ignorance of animal awareness research generally) is astounding.

It may well be that you’ve never met anybody who thinks that all animals see in monochrome—maybe you’re young, maybe you don’t get out much, or maybe you don’t have discussions about animals much. Fortunately, the ‘animals see in black and white’ trope is dying (as bad ideas should), but it’s not dead.

To give you some context: I’m so old that when I went to school we were not allowed to use calculators (mine was the last generation to use trig tables). If you polled people my age (especially outside metropolitan areas) I reckon you would get >50% of them declaring that animals see in “black and white”—that’s certainly my anecdotal experience.

Lastly: what makes you think that dogs see in monochrome? As far as we can tell dogs see the visual spectrum in the same way as a red-green colour-blind human does—they have both rods and cones in their visual apparatus, but with different sensitivities than humans’ (same for cats, but carts lack cones that filter for red).

Of course we are only using “We can do this, and we have these cells” methods to make that call: as with some migratory birds that can ‘see’ magnetic fields, dogs and cats may have senses of which we are not yet aware. Cats certainly act as if they know something we don’t.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 22:08 UTC
−9 points
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: Closet survey #1
Do you seriously think that the Pledge of Allegiance (and other similar things) are not designed to indoctrinate? Let’s go to the writings of the guy who penned the Pledge of Allegiance:
- ″..the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.” (emphasis mine)
The foundational aim of indoctrination is to get people when their minds are sufficiently plastic as to have few critical filters (i.e., in childhood) and to ‘re-wire’ the plastic brain/mind with the indoctrinator’s desired trope at the front. This is done by rote (church liturgies, pledges and so forth).

As elsewhere, you commit a logical fallacy: that the fact that you’re unaware of the work that has been done showing that propaganda works, means that it doesn’t.

Also, bad things do cause other bad things if the other bad things stem from a reduction in a defence mechanism, where the reduction was caused by the initial bad thing. Bombing water treatment (bad thing) and sewage plants causes increases in water borne disease (other bad things).

There’s no requirement for magic (and therefore no requirement for attempts at deploying hackneyed middle-school debating tropes).

There is a very sound basis for believing that attempts to indoctrinate lead to a tendency for the population to be indoctrinated: the best basis that I can think of is that governments invest heavily in indoctrination using the same methodology as developed by Bernays and later Goebbels. If the methdology was not leading to the desired result, .gov would change it (I’m no admirer of .gov’s ability to get things right, but the indoctrination of the pubic is the sine qua non of the tax-parasite’s life).

Indoctrinated individuals have a greater tendency to lower levels of critical thinking (ever had an argument with a born again Christian? cheap shot, but I can give you a bunch of cites from the psych lit, too). Thus any device that increases the net level of indoctrination will cause—not by ‘magic’ - an increase in other things associated with reduced critical faculties.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 21:46 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: ikrase’s comment on: Morality is Awesome

Plus your idea is even more vulnerable to utility monsters than utilitarianism since it only requires people with moderate unusual or nosy preferences …snip...

That might be what you imagine “my” idea to involve, but it isn’t.

There is a perfectly sensible, rational way to determine if people’s supposed hurt feelings impose actual costs: ask them to pay to ameliorate them. Dislike watching gay folks kiss? Pay them not to. (I dislike watching anybody kiss—that’s just me—but not enough to be prepared to pay to reduce the incidence of public displays of affection).

What’s that? There are folks who are genuinely harmed, but don’t have the budget to pay for amelioration? That’s too bad—and it’s certainly not a basis for permitting the creation of (or continued existence of) an entity whose purposes have—always and everywhere—been captured and perverted, and ruined every economic system in history.

And not for nothin’… it’s all fine and dandy to blithely declare that “high powered people cannot necessarily step lightly” as if that disposes of 500 years worth of academic literature criticising the theoretical basis for the State: at this point in time no State is raining death on your neighbourhood (but yours is probably using your taxes—plus debt written in your name—to rain death on others).

Let’s by all means have a discussion on the idea that the non-initiation of force is ‘unworkable’ - that’s the same line of reasoning that declared that without the Church holding a monopoly to furnish moral guidance, we would all descend to amoral barbarism. These days churches are voluntary (and Popes still live in palaces) - and violent crime is on a secular downtrend that has lasted the best part of a century. And so it will be when the State goes away.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 21:22 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: danlowlite’s comment on: The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
For some reason I can’t reply to MugaSofer’s response, so I’ll just put this here...

that would seem to imply that infertile women are not female. Do you use a similar definition for male, or consider all non-females “male”?

It would seem to imply nothing of the sort.

Here’s an example of how badly you dropped the logical ball:

Saying
- “people who write things like you just wrote, are making really stupid rookie errors in logic and calling their capacity for argument into question”
is qualitatively not related to saying
- “people who write things other than what you wrote never make really stupid rookie errors in logic and their capacity for argument cannot be questioned”.
Related: If A implies B, that does not mean that NotA implies NotB.

I’m not sure if I should be using scare quotes for “female” :-\

Seems a lot of folks here are conflating the idea of female with the idea of woman. Female is a term of science, not socio-waffle: woman is (latterly) some idea about how one feels within one’s own skin. A female may identify as a man, and a male may identify as a woman. (Note also: I am perfectly aware that the etymology of “female” is said to be the Latin femina, which means woman: words do not mean what their roots mean).

It’s really not that hard.

EDIT: Why the SOTL quote?

To make you think “Why the SOTL quote? [Does this guy hate women?]”

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 21:01 UTC
−9 points
in reply to: MugaSofer’s comment on: Tolerate Tolerance
What was the title of the post? Something about tolerance, if I’m not mistaken.

As to your ‘secondly’ point… I absolutely agree with the statement that “most people cannot, by definition, be in a better position to judge on certain issues than most other people” (emphasis mine—in fact I would extend that to say on most issues of more than minimal complexity).

Absolutely key point to bear in mind is that if you harangue someone about a problem when you’re not in a better position to judge on that particular issue, you’re being an asshat. That’s why I tend to limit my haranguing to matters of (deep breath)...
- Economics (in which I have a double-major First, with firsts in Public Finance, Macro, Micro, Quantitative Economic Policy, International Economics, Econometric Theory and Applied Econometrics) and
- Econometrics (and the statistical theory underpinning it) for which I took straight Firsts at Masters;
- Quantitative analysis of economic policy (and economic modelling generally). which I did for a living for half a decade and taught to undergraduates (3rd year and Honours).
I babble with muted authority on
- expectations (having published on, and having been asked to advise my nation’s Treasury on, modelling them in financial markets within macroeconometric models), and
- the modelling paradigm in general (having worked for almost a decade at one of the world’s premier economic modelling think tanks, and having dabbled in a [still-incomplete] PhD in stochastic simulation using a computable general-equilibrium model).
And yet I constantly find myself being told things about economics, utility maximisation, agency problems, and so forth, by autodidacts who think persentio ergo rectum is a research methodology.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 20:41 UTC
−14 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
Really? You went straight for a baby right off the bat? A baby is an actor which is specifically not free to do as it wishes, for a large range of very sensible reasons—including but not limited to the fact that it is extremely reliant on third parties (parents or some other adult) to take care of it.

I’m not of the school that a baby is not self-owning, which is to say that it is rightly the property of its parents (but it is certainly not the property of uninvolved third parties, and most certainly not property of the State): I believe that babies have agency, but it is not full agency because babies do not have the capacity to rationally determine what will cause them harm.

Individuals with full agency should be permitted to self-harm—it is the ultimate expression of self-ownership (regardless of how squeamish we might be about it: it imposes psychic costs on others and is maybe self-centred, but to deny an individual free action on the basis that it might make those nearby feel a bit sad, is a perfect justification for not freeing slaves).

Babies are like retards (real retards, not internet retards [99% of whom are within epsilon of normal]): it is rational to deny them full liberty. Babies do not get to do as they will. (But let’s not let the State decide who is a retard or mentally ill—anybody familiar with the term ‘drapetomania’ will immediately see why).

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 19:54 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: Peterdjones’s comment on: Morality is Awesome
The problem has been ‘solved’ only to the extent that people accept 2nd-year Public Finance as it’s taught to 3rd years economics students (which stops short of two of the most critical problems with the theory - bureaucratic capture/corruption, and war—and a third… the general equilibrium effects of a very large budget-insensitive actor in goods and factor markets).

The basic Pub Fi model is that the existence of publicness characteristics in some goods means that some markets (health, education, defence) are underexpanded, and some (pollution, nuisance) are over-expanded, due to social benefits and costs not being taken into account… which—on a purely utilitarian basis—are to be resolved by .gov… from there you learn that diminishing marginal utility of money means that it imposes the lowest “excess burden” on society if you tax income progressively. The nyou add up all the little Harberger (welfare) triangles and declare that the State serves a utility-optimising function.

HUGE problem (which I would have thought any rational individual would have spotted) is that the moment you introduce a ‘.gov’, you set on the table a giant pot of money and power. In democracies you then say “OK, this pot of money and power is open for competition: all you have to do is convince 30% of the voting public, which is roughly the proportion of the population who can’t read the instructions on a tin of beans (read any LISS/ALSS survey)… and if you lie your head off in doing so, no biggie because nobody will punish you for it.”

Who gets attracted by that set of incentives? Sociopaths… and they’re the wrong people to have in charge of the instrument that decides which things “are of utility to everyone” (and more to the point, decides how much of these ‘things’ will be produced… or more accurately how much will be spent on them).

Others’ education is not of utility to me, beyond basic literacy (which the State is really bad at teaching, especially if you look at value for money) - and yet States operate high schools and universities, the value of which is entirely captured by higher lifetime incomes (i.e., it’s a private benefit).

Others’ health is not of utility to me, except (perhaps) for downstream effects from vaccination and some minimal level of acute care- and yet States run hospitals with cardiac units (again, things with solely private benefits).

And State-furnished money is specifically and deliberately of lower utility year on year (it is not a store of constant value).

You seem to think that in the absence of a State, the things you mention will ‘go to zero’ - that’s not what “public goods” implies. It simply implies that the amount produced of those goods will be lower than a perfectly informed agent (with no power in or effect on factor markets) would choose—that is, that the level of production that actually occurs will be sub-optimal, not that it will be zero. And always in utils—i.e., based on the assumption that taking a util from a sickly child and giving it to Warren Buffet, is net-social-utility-neutral.

Also… what do States do intertemporally? Due to the tendency of bureaucracies to grow, States always and everywhere grow outside of the bounds of their “defensible” spheres of action. Taxes rise, output quality falls (as usual for coercive monopolies), debts accumulate. Cronies are enriched.

And then there’s war: modern, industrial scale, baby-killing. All of those Harberger triangles that were accumulated by ‘optimally’ expanding the public goods are blown to smithereens by wasting them on cruise missiles and travelling bands of State sociopaths.

There is a vast literature on the optimality of furnishing all ‘critical’ State functions by competitive processes—courts, defence, policing etc—Rothbard, Hoppe and others in that space make it abundantly clear that the State is a net negative, even if you use the (ludicrously simplistic) utilitarian framework to analyse it.

So yeah… the problem has been solved: just not in the way you think it has.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 7:52 UTC
−12 points
in reply to: danlowlite’s comment on: The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence
Let’s just say that if it is capable of gestating a foetus (of its own species) to ‘maturity’ (i.e., birth) internally, it’s female, irrespective of what nonsense it claims in its ‘self identification’.

It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 6:45 UTC
−3 points
on: How to Disentangle the Past and the Future
The idea of entanglement of present and future states is what makes me think that dogs invest (albeit with a strategy that has binding constraints on rate of return): they know that by burying a bone, the probability that it will be available for them at some later date, is higher than it would be if the bone was left in the open.

In other words, the expected rate of return from burying, is greater than for not-burying. (Both expected rates of return are negative, and E[RoR|not-burying]= −100% for relatively short investment horizons).

It also opens up the idea that the dog knows that the bone is being stored for ‘not-now’, and that ‘not-now’ is ‘after-now’ in some important sense: that is, that dogs understand temporal causality in ways other than simple Pavlovian torture-silliness.

I’ve also watched a crow diversify: I was tossing him pieces of bread from my motel balcony while on a hiking holiday. He ate the first five or six pieces of bread, then started caching excess bread under a rock. After he’d put a couple of pieces under the rock, he cached additional pieces elsewhere, and did this for several different locations.

E[Pr(loss=100%)] diminishes when you bury the bone, but it diminishes even more if you bury multiple bones at multiple locations (i.e., you diversify).

And yet there are still educated people who will tell you that animals’ heads are full of little more than “[white noise]...urge to have sex...[white noise]...urge to eat… [white noise]… PREDATOR! RUN… [white noise]...”—again, the tendency to run from a predator indicates that the animal is conscious of its (future) fate if it fails to escape, and it knows that it will ‘cease-to-be’ if the predator catches it.

The same sort of people believe that animals see in monochrome (in which case, why waste scarce evolutionary resources on developing, e.g., bright plumage?)

Surprise… I’m a vegetarian.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 6:13 UTC
−8 points
in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Tolerate Tolerance
I can think of another 3 reasons to explain Bayes theorem in terms of mammograms (or “mammographies” if you prefer) - boobs, torture and the mathematical ignorance of physicians.

Tolerance is over-rated (although it’s a Masonic virtue so I’m supposed to like it): to me, the word has supercilious connotations—kind of “I’m going to permit you to persist in error, unmolested, coz I’m just that awesome”.

I prefer acceptance: after you have harangued someone with everything that’s wrong with their view of the problem, give up and accept that they’re idiots.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 5:24 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: Z_M_Davis’s comment on: Closet survey #1
And in the US there’s the whole North-Korea style pledging of allegiance to a piece of coloured cloth. So no shock then that USAans seem to run to “heavily indoctrinated” (and hence woo-girls, laugh-tracks, zinger comedy, etc) - and also no shock that in a Pew Poll of US adults in 2007, 68% of respondents said that they believed that angels and demons intervene in their everyday lives. (Presumably a lot of those people attended school at some stage, and yet managed to get to adulthood believe in the equivalent of the easter bunny).

Outside of your borders, all of that freaks us civilised folks out.

Kratoklastes 10 Jan 2013 5:14 UTC
2 points
on: Closet survey #1
Late to this (only by 4 years… so fifty smartphone generations), but LOVE the idea.

I believe—firmly, and with conviction—that the modal politician is a parasitic megalomaniacal sociopath who should be prevented at all costs from obtaining power; that the State (and therefore democracy) is an entirely illegitimate way of ameliorating public goods problems and furthering ‘social objectives’.

Hence my nick (which I invented).