Anyone can easily deny that they are biased. That takes no effort. So, again, why is it a ‘godawful clickbait piece-of-crap’?
passive_fist
Karma: 2,169
On the contrary, being able to identify your own biases and being able to express what kind of information would change your mind is at the heart of rationality.
You’re a libertarian. We all know that. But regardless of whether you ideologically agree with the conclusions of the article or not, you should be able to give a more convincing counter-argument than ‘godawful clickbait piece-of-crap.’
What you’re saying doesn’t sound to me like a disagreement that there must be some higher authority. It just sounds like you’re saying that the final authority gets decided at run-time, based on whoever happens to have the most financial power. So then the question becomes: Why do you think this is preferable to a system where authority is agreed upon beforehand by a majority of the people?
And just to make the discussion clearer, let’s make it even more specific and talk about the issue of disputes over ownership of objects or property.
The comparison to religion makes no sense. Unlike biological organisms, human governments are designed. For example, in the case of the US, the structure and function of the court system is very explicitly laid out in the US constitution, and it was carefully designed in a committee via months/years of debate.
In each possible situation, it’s useful to have an authority available who has final say over disputes. But it’s not necessarily for every process in society to depend on the same authority.
Then who gets to decide who that authority is for every particular situation?
Can you be more specific?
I don’t know what “an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom” means. Every single political philosophy claims that it is pro-freedom. Even totalitarian regimes claim to be pro-freedom. Without reference to specific policy positions, claiming to be ‘pro-freedom’ seems meaningless to me.
So that reduces your definition of libertarianism to ‘far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis’.
For a stable society to exist, at some level everyone has to agree upon some central authority with final say over disputes and superlative enforcement ability. Do you agree with this or not?
I’ve tried before to steelman it and failed because the arguments constantly shift around and are hard to pin down. Tailoring arguments to every single person’s interpretation gets tiring after a while. But if you can provide an explanation or link to what you believe then I’d read and try to steelman it to see if I understand your position correctly.
Here, though, I’m arguing on a more meta level—even assuming that it comprised a coherent set of beliefs, and assuming you had a well-defined utility function you wanted to maximize, how would you possibly go about providing a truly rational justification that libertarianism applied to a large mass of complicated human beings would result in the desired outcome? This also applies to capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. Essentially anything other than pure utilitarianism, but even utilitarianism requires a lot of fleshing out before you get to anything resembling a working procedure for governing people.
What surprises me is that you would even ask that question… what rational justification is there for libertarianism?
Neoreaction, libertarianism, and related ideologies.
I don’t see why I should fear retaliation as I’ve already left this site, for all intents and purposes.
The only issue is that I don’t want to give the impression of having left over some petty argument and being bitter over it. The reality is the opposite. The reality is that there were never any heated disagreements. It was just me observing a very clear irrational, politically extremist bias in many people’s comments, especially the ones most frequently in the ‘top 30 contributors’ panel (which shows that their beliefs in general match up with the overall beliefs in this community). In a few cases this bias went even to the extent of denying basic accepted science. In the end I realized that instead of trying to debate on LW rationally, it would be a better use of my time to go elsewhere.
I somewhat agree. Sometimes communities dissolve through a publicized schism. Other times they just decay without any visible drama. It’s not realistic to expect every single person who gets fed up and leaves to post a detailed criticism of the site and why they are leaving. A lot of people would rather just leave quietly and not waste their time with that kind of thing.
Still, it seems like the decline definitely accelerated over the past couple of years.
The LW community is in rapid decline and people have been leaving in large numbers for years. LW is probably in the terminal stage of decline now, not in the initial or even middle stage. If you think this isn’t true you are in denial—all the poll data and post/comment data shows this to be true.
I used to be an active member of this group. This is my first comment in months. I don’t know why other people left; I can only speculate and offer the reasons why I left. The reason I left was because I perceived (maybe incorrectly, I don’t know) that discourse was being dominated by a handful of individuals who had very little interest in actual rational unbiased discussion and were more interested in forcing their views on everyone under the pretense of rationality.
I guess it’s a lesson and a set of things to learn for the next LW-like site. It’s a lesson in how quickly good intentions (rational discussion and questioning authority) can lead to the evaporative cooling effect and the adoption of extreme sociological/political views while pretending that this is not taking place.
It’s not obvious that use of a pesticide would substantially harm bees, as pesticides have been in use for a very long time, and many organophosphate pesticides are fairly non-toxic to bees. Neonicotinoids, however, are extremely toxic to bees. The use of neonicotinoids is fairly recent; large-scale use only started in the late 90′s, and very soon after that beekeepers started filing petitions to the EPA. They were ignored. I’d say this is more a case of systemic and deliberate ignorance/politics rather than a ‘mistake’.
I wouldn’t put too much faith in the 1/2000 figure for chance of HIV transmission. There is no known way to calculate that with any reasonable confidence. Estimates vary from something like 1⁄500 to 1/2500 (this is for vaginal sex; anal sex has much higher transmission risk).
Well then if there is no information relevant to ISIS, then why make it a discussion about ISIS?
It seems to me that a pre-requisite of talking about ISIS’ motivations would be actually visiting the region and being involved with them first-hand, or else basing your opinion on information gathered from direct, reputable sources.
Right now most of the discussion on the internet—especially including this post—fail to meet this criterion. They are simply opinions based on opinions repeated by other uninformed persons which also repeat opinions from other uninformed persons. If I am wrong, then provide links to your sources.
In fact you could argue that the major factor in the West’s seeming inability to deal with ISIS is the failure of intelligence gathering. The CIA and other agencies have admitted they have a hard time gathering intelligence about them (this may be misdirection on part of the CIA, however).
Statistically, withdrawal is just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy; STDs are a bigger concern but the risk can be minimized with a checkup. However, condoms are not effective at preventing transmission of many types of STDs either.
I feel that this is too complicated a solution for most people to follow. And it’s not a very secure backup system anyway.
You can just get an external hard drive and use any of the commonly-available full-drive backup software. Duplicity is a free one and it has GUI frontends that are basically just click-to-backup. You can also set them up to give you weekly reminders, etc.
Then there are generally impressive things like having a Ph.D, a high-paying job, or being really skilled in some area which are high status in many groups.
For Ph.D., what kind of groups are you thinking about? (aside from university circles obviously)
And Lumifer’s dismissal of it is probably the most low-effort way of responding. Students of rationality, take note.