The Big Questions

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton changes things up today by reviewing The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics. Questions that big need a big review and you can learn what Bennett has to say about it all by reading below.

The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics
author	Steven E. Landsburg
pages	288 pages
publisher	Free Press
rating	8/10
reviewer	Bennett Haselton
ISBN	978-1439148211
summary	Steven Landsburg uses concepts from mathematics, economics, and physics to address the big questions in philosophy

The first thing that I have to admit as a reviewer is that I enjoyed the book -- not just reading it, but scribbling out pages of scratch paper working on the puzzles inspired by the book -- that I probably would have paid up to about $200 for it (despite the fact that I disagreed with many of the conclusions, and even thought some of the arguments were pretty weak). I certainly don't mean that it's better than books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, or Steven Levitt and Steven Dubner (the Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics team), but it will appeal to many of the same people.

Those authors' books typically marshall a large amount of research data and evidence in support of a thesis that seems contrarian but turns out to be probably true. The Big Questions (released November 3rd with a companion website and blog doesn't do that. The book is divided into many self-contained vignettes and side topics and independent arguments, which are based more on logic and reasoning than externally gathered evidence, and the arguments don't always convince you of the conclusions. But that's part of the fun: many of the arguments in the book are structured so rigorously, almost like mathematical proofs, that if you disagree the conclusion, the challenge is to figure out why you think the conclusion is wrong. (Nobody ever scribbled equations in the margins of Malcolm Gladwell's books trying to figure out if he was "right".)

You'll probably enjoy the book the most if the following are true for you:

• You enjoyed math all the way through high school, especially the paradoxes that seemed to grow out of elementary rules of logic or probability. Sometimes the paradoxes resulted from a flaw in one of the reasoning steps, so that identifying the flaw led to a deeper understanding of how to conduct those steps. And sometimes there really is no flaw in the reasoning, so that the conclusion, no matter how counterintuitive, must be true.
• Eventually, though, you ran out of "paradoxes" that could be described in the language of intermediate mathematics. There are other paradoxes lurking in mathematics, of course (like the celebrated Banach-Tarski paradox), but most of them require you to learn so much mathematics just to understand the paradox, that there aren't enough hours in the day.
• So, you'd be delighted to discover paradoxes in an entirely new field, where arguments built from elementary rules of logic, lead to a conclusion that seems at first to make no sense, but leads to a deeper understanding the more you think about it.

The core philosophy of The Big Questions -- not embodying any of the conclusions, but rather the rules of the game by which those conclusions should be reached -- is expressed in two lines near the end:

If you're objecting to a logical argument, try asking yourself exactly which line in that argument you're objecting to. If you can't identify the locus of your disagreement, you're probably just blathering.

(This quote makes Landsburg sound grumpier than he is; at this point in the book, he's just coming off of describing an exhausting round of e-mail argument with another professor who he felt was not playing by these rules.) I've believed this passionately for a long time, and to me it seems trivially true anyway: If an argument is organized into a series of steps, and you disagree with the conclusion, then some step in the argument must be the first step you disagree with, and if the author feels like each step in their argument follows by airtight logic from the previous step, then that's the point at which one of the two players is wrong. There's nothing more exasperating to me than writing what I think is a well-reasoned logical argument, sending it to the intended audience, and getting back a reply which makes it obvious that the recipient simply read my conclusion, disagreed with it, cleared their throat, and started typing out paragraphs describing their own view. Which they're entitled to, but they missed the point -- I was hoping that if they disagreed with my argument, they could pinpoint exactly what part they disagreed with. (If they had replied with their own argument structured like a sequence of logical steps, then that would at least be a tit-for-tat exchange, but that rarely happens -- people who believe in forming their arguments like rigorous proofs, usually also like to find the error in logical arguments that lead to the opposite conclusion.)

To give you some of the flavor: One chapter in The Big Questions contains an elegant argument against protectionist tariffs: Suppose that an American sells cameras for $80 but a foreigner wants to sell cameras in America for $60 apiece. An American who would have bought the $80 camera will now buy the $60 camera and hence is better off by $20. The seller now has to sell their own cameras for $60 to stay competitive, so they are worse off by at most $20 -- however, if they voluntarily switch to some other business, then they'll be better off than they were when they were selling cameras for $60, and therefore worse off by some amount less than $20 from their original position. So on balance, abolishing protectionist tariffs would be good for Americans. "Therefore," writes Landsburg, "it seems to me that the protectionist's position is even less respectable than the creationist's. If you're convinced that most scientists are liars -- that everything they say about fossils, for example, is false -- then you can be a logically consistent creationist. But you can't be a logically consistent protectionist."

But the best part of reading an argument like that is to try and come up with a counter-argument that is equally rigorous. I think Landsburg is right, but only insofar as it applies to benefits to Americans. That leaves out another part of the equation: whether the production of cheaper foreign goods is harmful to foreigners providing the cheap labor. The textbook answer from economic theory is that the factory jobs must make workers better off (or at least no worse off) than they were before, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the jobs voluntarily. On the other hand, conditions in overseas sweatshops are so notoriously dangerous and unpleasant that it seems hard to believe the opportunities leave workers better off on balance. So you could be a logically consistent protectionist if you believe that: (a) sweatshop workers systematically underestimate how much the factory jobs are harming them; and (b) the harm done to the workers outweighs the benefits of lower prices for Americans. I'm not sure if these statements are true, but they are logically consistent. Still, Landsburg's argument is about as concise as possible and seems to refute any argument that protectionism makes
Americans better off on average.

In another chapter, Landsburg discusses the recent atheist bestsellers such as Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and suggests that these books are really directed against a non-existent enemy, because the evidence is quite strong that most adults do not really believe the tenets of any major religion anyway. There is the argument that "interfaith dialog" makes no sense if you really believe (as many major religions teach) that your own religion's tenets are settled beyond discussion. There is the argument that since economic theory consistently shows that people respond to threat of punishment, virtually no one behaves as if they actually believe in everlasting damnation after death as punishment for sin. And the fact that the voluntary martyrdom of suicide bombers is vastly more rare than most people believe, and a disproportionate number of those are children (as Landsburg says, "I do not deny that many children believe in God, just as I do not deny that many children believe in Santa Claus"). I'd wondered before about how many people really did believe in God, but in just a few pages this argument had me thinking that the number was a lot lower than I'd ever thought before.

On the other hand, there were some arguments that I didn't spend much time puzzling over at all. Landsburg summarizes the paradox of "free will", and his dismissal of the paradox, basically as follows: The interactions of atoms that make up our brains and our environments, are deterministic processes, so if you know the state of a system at a given point in time, you could predict the state at any future point in time if you had enough computational power (with a caveat about the randomness possibly introduced by quantum physics). "Where, then, is there room for free will?... Easy: There is room for free will on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as the human being in question engages in deliberations that ultimately cause his actions." He says that just as "weather" is shorthand for the aggregate of the interactions of trillions of water molecules, "free will" is the same kind of shorthand:

"What caused your decision to get drunk and watch Mystery Science Theater the night before your philosophy final? Free will. An insane person might object that free will can't be it at all, because free will is just a shorthand term for an indescribably complex process involving trillions of neurons, which in turn can be described in terms of quadrillions of atoms and quintillions of subatomic particles. So what? You still have free will, and you know it."

I wrote Landsburg to object that this misses what people really mean by "free will" -- it's not just a shorthand term for the aggregate of particle interactions that make up human choices. It means, very specifically, that you could possibly have done something other than what you did. Landsburg replied to this objection by e-mail: "I dispute that there is any way to make sense of a phrase like 'could possibly have done something else'. I know what it means to say you did something; spacetime consists of all the things that get done; it is what it is." And I agree; it's hard to pin down what the statement means. But it underlies all of our instincts and intuition about human choices and blame: "You could have called yesterday, but you didn't." "I should have studied harder last night." If determinism is true, then these statements make no sense, and therein lies what I think most people mean then they refer to the paradox of determinism vs. free will. I think the issue deserves more thought than it's given in the book.

This is followed by a passage arguing that the controversy over "ESP" is silly, because of course everyone knows certain things by "extra-sensory perception", if by that you mean "things perceived not through the senses" -- like mathematical truths, which are arrived at through thought and not sensory input. Writes Landsburg: "Some of those phenomena have one additional characteristic: They are physically impossible. But if you're going to define ESP by its impossibility, then of course there's no point in debating it... And if impossibility is not a criterion, then mathematical insight is as good an example of ESP -- in the everyday sense of the term -- as any instance of clairvoyance or telepathy." Actually, I think the everyday use of the word "ESP" refers to perceiving facts that do not logically have to be true (so mathematical facts are excluded) -- like "Someone is watching me right now" -- without sensory input. And, once you clarify the definition, most people agree there's no evidence for it, so the whole discussion seems uninteresting.

But even if you throw out 75% of the book's arguments (which is far more than I rejected), you should still enjoy puzzling through the remaining 25% and forming your own conclusions. The most interesting argument in the book, to me, is about how to properly answer the question: How much should the government be willing to spend, to save the life of one of it's citizens? Of course if you're Ayn Rand, the answer is zero, but if you want to answer the question according to the laws of economic efficiency, it's a tough one. Landsburg originally got into the debate by writing a column arguing that ventilator support was not the most efficient way to help the poor. (Unfortunately, he couched it in the language of "ventilator insurance", which I think clouded the issue. I think it would have been more clear to say: "If we're going to spend this money to help the poor at all, it would make more sense to spend it on groceries for a far larger number of people, than to spend it on ventilator support for one person.") Another more liberal economist, Robert Frank, responded with a New York Times editorial arguing with Landsburg's methods and coming up with his own reasoning. I think there are problems with the reasoning on both sides (not logical errors, but rather situations in which the rules that they have adopted, lead to paradoxes and untenable positions -- suggesting that both sides' axioms have to be thrown out), but I still don't know the answer. (My own opinion about the flaws in their logic, and an alternative answer, is at this link: "How much should government spend to save a single life?")

The Big Questions also has excursions into areas of science and mathematics that I had never fully understood before, and in some cases hadn't even thought about. Landsburg describes how he had first learned that colors could be arranged continuously into a color wheel, and later learned that they could be arranged continuously along a line according to their wavelengths, and then a friend pointed out the contradiction. Which is it? Do colors vary continuously in two dimensions (forming a wheel) or one (forming a line)? Or, wait a minute, we measure colors according to the strength of their red, green, and blue components, so don't they vary continuously in three dimensions? Well, the answer is in there.

There are also chapters on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and the quantum phenomenon of "spooky action at a distance", which explain all of the concepts more clearly than I'd ever heard them explained anywhere else. I think that most writers attempting to explain these concepts err either on the side of being too precise -- determined that everything they right be correct, with no regard for whether they reader grasps it or not -- or too vague -- giving the general air of mystery, but not explaining the rules governing how a phenomenon works, and how to work with those rules to derive other conclusions from them. Landsburg's chapter simply begins, "This chapter is full of lies. That's because I'll be explaining the foundations of quantum mechanics, and I assume that if you wanted a careful accounting of every detail, you'd be reading a textbook." The text then gives an example of considering an electron that moves in a conceptual "circle", where at some points on the circle it has a greater probability of manifesting itself in one location if you examine it, and at other points it has a greater probability of manifesting itself in another location. He uses this to dispel a common misconception about the uncertainty principle:

You're just idly wondering where the electron is. In most circumstances, quantum mechanics says that it's quite impossible for you to know the answer to that question.

Aha! A fundamental limitation on human knowledge, no? No. Here's why: Most of the time, the electron is nowhere. Asking "Where is the electron?" is akin to asking "What is the electron's favorite movie?". It's a nonsense question. The inability to answer nonsense questions is not a fundamental limitation on knowledge.

How can the electron be nowhere? Because electrons behave nothing at all like anything you're familiar with. Instead of a location, the electron has a quantum state.

This clarified something for me that had bugged me for years. I never took a course in quantum physics, but I had indeed always assumed that electrons did have a "location" and the uncertainty principle referred to a limit on our ability to determine that location. Unfortunately there are probably many people who get through an entire course in quantum physics without getting this cleared up.

Balanced against these valuable insights are some libertarian arguments that are probably nothing you haven't heard before, especially if you have read of one of Landsburg's earlier books, Fair Play -- subtitled "What your child can teach you about economics, values, and the meaning of life", although the book was clearly about what he was teaching to his daughter. Many reviewers of Fair Play took note of passages like this one:

Most people have instinctive sympathy for the man who says "I tried for months to get a job and nobody would hire me. Only in desperation did I turn to theft." The same people have only scorn for the man who says "I tried for months to get a date and nobody would go out with me. Only in desperation did I turn to rape."

While I think most rape victims would have some choice words about the comparison, I was more unpersuaded because the passage wasn't structured like a true argument. In a good argument -- like Landsburg's earlier argument against protectionist tariffs -- -- you start with premises that seem apparently true, proceed by steps that seem apparently valid, and end with a conclusion that may not have been obvious from the outset. But in this case, the premise is the argument -- either you think rape and theft are comparable, or you don't. I don't think they are, because (a) the harm to a rape victim is out of proportion to the "benefit" to the rapist, and (b) notwithstanding the claims of college males, you won't actually die without sex. (Just as a thought experiment, if you would die without sex, and a man hadn't been able to get any women to sleep with him, and the government didn't provide any sort of sex "safety net", more people probably would feel sympathy for the rapist, if he only did it to save his own life.)

Some passages in The Big Questions are recycled from Fair Play and require a (just) slightly more thoughtful rebuttal. Landsburg argues that most parents, deep down, must not believe in redistributive taxation because

"I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do. Nor have I ever heard a parent tell a child that if one kid has more toys than the others, then it's okay for those others to form a 'government' and vote to take those toys away."

OK, but... I have also never heard a parent tell their child that it was OK to build a "jail" and put other kids in that "jail" for wrongdoing. And yet almost everyone, even libertarians, supports some form of imprisonment for lawbreakers. The lesson here is that there are some powers that are appropriate to delegate to a democratically elected government, with all the right checks and balances, but that you don't want random vigilantes seizing for themselves. So if you want a principled argument against taxation, it would take more than that.

And other passages in Fair Play deservedly did not make the cut of being imported into The Big Questions:

The massacre at Waco took place only days after my daughter (then aged six) had asked me how the government uses our tax dollars. When she walked in on the television coverage of flamed and carnage, I told her that now she was seeing the answer to her question. And when she heard that there were children in there, that they were burning children, her eyes grew wide with horror, and I both hope and believe that she will never forget that moment.

If you want 230 pages of that, then Fair Play is the book for you!

Of the libertarian arguments that did get carried over into The Big Questions, I think the problem with most of them is not that I think the conclusion is wrong, but, again, that the whole argument is the premise, and if you disagree with the premise then there's nothing to think about. For example:

Bert wants to hire an office manager and Ernie wants to manage an office. The law allows Ernie to refuse any job for any reason. If he doesn't like Albanians, he doesn't have to work for one. Bert is held to a higher standard: If he lets it be known that no Albanians need apply, he'd better have a damned good lawyer.

These asymmetries grate against the most fundamental requirement of fairness -- that people should be treated equally, in the sense that their rights and responsibilities should not change because of irrelevant external circumstances.

But I think the laws do treat all people equally, because they apply equally whether Bert is discriminating in deciding whether to hire Ernie, or whether Ernie is discriminating in deciding whether to hire Bert. The laws don't apply equally to all roles that people play, which is the distinction that Landsburg is highlighting -- but laws never apply equally to different roles, since roles are defined by what we do, and what is the point of laws, except to draw distinctions based on behaviors? So there may be some other argument against anti-discrimination laws, but "symmetry" by itself wouldn't be enough.

A footnote in this chapter of The Big Questions says, "Portions of this chapter are adapted from my earlier book Fair Play." In the margin where I'd been scribbling all of my notes and equations and counterarguments, I wrote, "That's what's wrong with it!"

And yet, as I said, I would probably have paid up to about $200 for the book, based on how much I enjoyed the parts that I did like. At one point Landsburg praises an insight from Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter and adds, "You should read all their books." Yes, and all of Richard Dawkins's and Malcolm Gladwell's and Steven Pinker's and Dubner's and Levitt's books, for starters. Landsburg himself would probably agree that it's more important to read those books, than this one. But there's time in your life to read The Big Questions as well. It's even structured so you can consume it in bite-sized portions while taking a break from working your way through those other books -- which are, in truth, more valuable, but not as much fun.

You can purchase The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

That Quote Really Hit Home

[eldavojohn]

What caused your decision to get drunk and watch Mystery Science Theater the night before your philosophy final?

My god, it's like looking into a mirror.

Free will.

Oddly enough when I responded to the last question on the final by drawing parallels between getting drunk and watching MST3K with Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom [wikipedia.org], my professor assured me that it was sloven stupidity--not free will--and graded me accordingly.

I think the big questions are "big"

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely because the big questions will never be answered by mathematics, economics and physics, but in the minds of mad apes trapped in a pointless existence.

As I get older, I still find myself an atheist, but I now longer feel logic and reason and math will ever prove God doesn't exist, and I no longer expect everyone to agree with me.

   

Re:I think the big questions are "big"

[MightyMartian]

You mean you actually thought that any of these things could prove the non-existence of such a being? The way that God, or at least the Judeo-Christian god is formulated, it cannot be done. Such a being is quite beyond any rational ability to disprove, by its very nature. But that's hardly an argument for God's existence. If I claim "Ten thousand invisible massless non-radiating faeries live in your left testicle", I have formulated similar beings whose existence is beyond science, mathematics, logic or any other rational approach. Does that mean they exist, or does it simply mean humans can create hypothetical or imaginary beings of that can't be disproven?

The real question isn't whether God exists or not, but whether or not such a being is even necessary. I can't disprove the existence of Thor, but I think we sufficiently understand lightning and thunder that we no longer need to invoke him as an explanation for these phenomena.

Re:When science fails.

[MightyMartian]

Translation: I don't like some of the things science is saying, so I'll give greater weight to my prejudices.

Protectionism

[benjamindees]

I have never seen an economist or "libertarian" give a convincing argument against protectionist tariffs.

however, if they voluntarily switch to some other business

Every argument always hinges on some inane assumption like a free market for labor or ignores production and instead focuses on individuals trading finished goods or promotes sacrificing long term gains for short term profit or assumes that new and better industries and business opportunities will always spring up or ignores the reality that the reason tariffs exist is to protect a nation's industry against the predatory practices of potentially hostile nation-states.

"Big" question?

[CannonballHead]

It's a "big" question to ask why there are atheistic best sellers?

most adults do not really believe the tenets of any major religion anyway.

Of course not. The question is, do most adults believe some of the tenets?

There is the argument that "interfaith dialog" makes no sense if you really believe (as many major religions teach) that your own religion's tenets are settled beyond discussion.

Ah yes. The "you have to have an open mind" argument. I guess evolution, global warming, and government health care debates, on the other hand, really ARE settled beyond discussion. [/sarcasm]. Seriously though - I know many major religions are of the gnostic type... hvae to have higher knowledge, enlightened, etc. But what exactly does "beyond discussion" mean? Not doubting/convinced? It seems that not-being-in-doubt and being-convinced are feelings reserved for atheists, now. Only someone dogmatically believing in the non-existence of an entity are allowed to be sure of their belief. Which is odd, since most logicians will tell you that it is much harder to prove non-existence than it is to prove existence. I wonder why Landsburg didn't mention that? Seems like that is a "big question" - why are many logicians and scientists atheists, since they are so careful not to deny existence of other things that we don't even have evidence for; they simply understand that denying existence is a big logical step in that you have to disprove every possible existence first. When it comes to the supernatural/God though, they are quite willing to believe in a non-existence and not be open to discussion. Why does Landsburg only pick on those who are convinced, perhaps illogically, that God does exist?

Incidentally, you can be illogically convinced to believe an correct thing, and you can be logically convinced to believe an incorrect thing. Logic is an argument; what you logically deduce or induce from makes a big difference, as your premise may be wrong, thus your conclusion could be wrong as well.

virtually no one behaves as if they actually believe in everlasting damnation after death as punishment for sin.

Most people don't behave like there is death at all. Most people don't want to talk about death, don't want to hear about death, and don't even want to think about death. Many people "defy" death and live like they won't die. I guess that means death doesn't actually exist! Cool!

I'd wondered before about how many people really did believe in God, but in just a few pages this argument had me thinking that the number was a lot lower than I'd ever thought before.

So without seeing any numbers and going entirely on the basis of logical deductions from unproved and perhaps disputed premises, you are coming to new conclusions on what people actually believe - without asking them.

Re:When science fails.

[CannonballHead]

so I'll give greater weight to my prejudices.

You say that as if scientists don't have prejudices/presuppositions/premises. I've never met a human that didn't.

Re:When science fails.

[MightyMartian]

I never said that, but the whole point of the scientific method is to weed out said prejudices.

Besides, the parent goes much beyond that and basically accuses the large majority of researchers in an area of research of knowingly publishing false information. That goes beyond "they're prejudiced" and basically calls them crooks. I'd challenge the parent to actually produce any such evidence. It's one thing to say "I don't agree with said theory" and quite another to say "they're liars".

Might be a good book

[Improv]

Sometimes being wrong in interesting ways about interesting things is quite good for starting discussions.

Didn't you ever get told to share?

[jfengel]

I have never, ever, heard a parent say to a child that it's okay to forcibly take toys away from other children who have more toys than you do.

Really? I have. They go to the parent and say, "That child has all of the toys and it's not fair." Frequently, the parent will agree, and if it's a child they have some control over (such as a sibling, or if the parent is babysitting) they will redistribute the toys.

They may couch it as a suggestion to "share", but they're not really planning on respecting the child's preference not to share. They will use force to overcome whatever "right" the child may have to those toys, regardless of whether the child has "earned" them. Because a parent's force is overwhelming compared to the child's, the use of force comes without violence much of the time. But it's force nonetheless, and it's the child ultimately exerting it, through the parents.

Re:I think the big questions are "big"

[nacturation]

Then how do you explain that hot girl from high school messaging me after not talking to me for over three years, and me having a dream with her in it the prior night?

Feynman explained this one quite well in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman". I don't remember exactly how the story went, but here's a retelling that gets a similar point across:

"I was fast asleep and I had the most vivid dream that my grandmother had died. Then, the phone rang and woke me up in the middle of the night. With hesitation, I answered the phone. It was a wrong number."

The point being that coincidences happen all the time. You only tend to remember the ones that match up. How many times have you thought about somebody and they didn't get in touch with you? Nobody tells the story of having dreamed about someone and they didn't call them.

It's question-begging.

[sean.peters]

He wants to prove that everything is essentially deterministic (waving his hands a bit, possibly justifiably, at the QM stuff), and claims that free will is a sort of emergent property. And does that by assuming that everything is deterministic. Um, ok.

I haven't read the book, but from the summary it seems as if it's part of a genre of books popular in recent years, in which experts in some field try to apply what they know to some other field that they don't know anything about... with sort of dubious results. The original Freakonomics, and even more so Superfreakonomics was like this. SF, in particularly, was done with a certain intellectual dishonesty, mischaracterizing the views of some of the climate scientists quoted in the climate change section, and using some fairly dubious assumptions in the section about whether to walk or drive after you've had a few too many. There was another book recently in the same vein - unfortunately, I can remember neither the author nor the title, so I can't link to it - but it was a statistician who tried to analyze climate data. He came to the conclusion that "global warming" was bunk - and was promptly (intellectually speaking) torn limb-from-limb by actual climate scientists. It turns out that blindly apply statistics to a problem you don't really understand is not necessarily the path to enlightenment.

Something to keep in mind when reading this sort of thing: books that study a problem and conclude that the intuitively obvious answer/conventional wisdom is correct... don't sell. If you want to move your book, it needs to be controversial, so there's a built-in incentive to say incendiary stuff. This particular book sounds interesting enough that I might check it out of the library, but I doubt I'd spend any money on it.

Sheesh, what a Glibertarian.

[E. Edward Grey]

There is a kind of person out there who is absolutely sure, with no evidence whatever, that basic numerical logic can be applied to complex human phenomena such as government, philosophy, and peace of mind with great success. I suspect that they are probably correct, if your measure of "great success" is also measured purely by basic numerical logic, i.e. a few additional points of efficiency that amounts to pennies in the pockets of people who could have done without them. And what they get in return is the satisfaction of knowing that they have total and complete control over those few pennies, which will never be delivered into the hands of bureaucracies which are inherently evil for some reason. Good for them. I'm sure Libertopia will one day be a grand place full of happy people who are overjoyed by the glib and peremptory assholes who would control debate, but I dare anyone to determine how the end result is markedly different from a society utterly ruled by any other kind of fervent belief - see the delightful anecdote about what kind of things Haselton teaches his six-year-old daughter, as if there was nothing more to it than "government takes your money and kills children. Sweet dreams honey." I don't know how you're doing worse than this if you're sending your kids off to Jesus Camp. It's a kind of unquestioning faith in the unproven for which most churches would kill...and have.

Interconnectedness is a basic fact of life. There are human forces much stronger than the kind of processes you learn in undergrad logic classes. Some gracefully accept it. Some never grow beyond fighting it. If you are of the very solid and hardly movable opinion that what really matters in life, what's really going to change the world, is precisely how you argue points of logic and how you pick apart someone else's, you're decidedly in the latter category, in which case there's a lot less of philosophy there than there is pathology. It's for that reason that I look forward to my down-modding with equanimity.

Re:Protectionism

[vlm]

First, "predatory" is a loaded adjective, and is meaningless in terms of economic activity. Is it "predatory" for people in one country to work for lower wages than the people in another country? Because that's the kind of "predatory" situation that is stopped by tariffs.

Yes, when the wage difference is due to social engineering governmental policies. Tariffs balance those differences out, thus creating a free(-er) market.

So, there is little need for US and German automakers to put tariffs on each other, because those governments are approximately, more or less equal. (I am sorry if I just insulted the entire German slashdot readership, my defense is its true, at least relative to my other example)

However, everything that China exports to the USA desperately needs USA import tariffs because the Chinese government actively encourages activities that the US government wisely will not permit USA companies to use, such as slave labor, no environmental controls at all, no worker safety regulations, limited/no health care (admittedly somewhat applies to USA), no product liability, no IP laws at all, industrial espionage is permitted (if not encouraged), etc.

Can't have a free market, when the players aren't equally free (or at least brought to mostly the same level by tariffs)

Re:Protectionism

[vlm]

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. What you describe is exactly the opposite: a coercive, authoritarian market.

If you have protectionist tariffs then your market is neither free nor libertarian. If these tariffs were in fact "critical economically" then free, libertarian markets would be a contradiction. Fortunately, they're not.

Oh, I agree with you completely, tariffs ALONE would result in a coercive authoritarian market.

But we already have a coercive authoritarian market because of a seemingly infinite collection of government social engineering regulations.

At least some of the time, one simple tariff can cancel out the distorting effects of hundreds of govt social engineering regulations, leaving an almost free market. Thats why they are critical economically, not subtracting out the cost of regulations via tariffs is like not subtracting expenses from incomes to get profit, or something truly basic like that.

Example, using political prisoners is free for the Chinese, giving them a $10 unfair advantage over free Americans. No free market can exist. Adding a $10 tariff results in something almost like a free market.

Tariffs and government regulation must be balanced, they algebraically cancel each other, like yin and yang or whatever.

Re:Protectionism

[benjamindees]

Okay, so let's say I want to work for zero wages to give your country free drugs. They're free. I'll refine and ship them to your citizens for free. Do you want to enact a tariff on them or would you be better off accepting them?

What if it's poisoned children's toys instead?

How about food subsidies. I'll send your citizens free food. Would you accept it or would it be better for your citizens to grow their own food? Don't worry, I wouldn't cut off your food supplies and then declare war on you.

Ammunition? Tires? Steel?

Re:I think the big questions are "big"

[MightyMartian]

Well, to the limits that we can test things, we know that dead people don't come back to life, particularly after three days, at which point in most normal temperate environments putrefaction is well on its way.

That being said, again we run up against a being of unlimited powers. Once you invoke such a being, why even reversal of putrefaction and rescucitation is possible. You simply cannot falsify the claim "Christ rose from the dead" because it relies once again upon the actions of an alleged omnipotent being.

I think it's a ludicrous out, rather like me claiming Abraham Lincoln was in communication with aliens, and declaring "You can disprove it if you can show Abraham Lincoln didn't communicate with aliens!"

You can't prove a negative.

How to make a bomb

[copponex]

Markets are systems. Systems, if you care if they exist or not, must be regulated. The free market you're talking about is like supernova. Yes, eventually there will be some sort of equilibrium, but it's useless to everything it destroyed in order to reach that state. If you want to build a bomb, you don't throw random volatile elements into a mason jar and shake it up, unless you have a death wish.

Let me give you an example. You probably know Adam Smith's name. Due to your simplistic interpretation of "free" markets, I doubt you have any idea of what he wrote. He stated that a 5% cap on interest rates was necessary to force investment in "real" profits, not just interest profits, or else all capital would flood into financial sectors and destabilize the market. No one is going to build a car factory if they can make the same money by moving their money around.

Unless you are willing to watch sick people die outside of hospitals or shoot people in the head who cost society more to keep alive than to kill, you aren't going to have a libertarian market. It's not in our nature. A hundred years ago there were even discussions about whether making money without working, or working very little, should be considered moral. Imagine that.

All of the things those scaaaarrrry governments provide is called regulation. Regulation leads to standards. Standards are what allow infrastructure, market competitiveness, and a little thing I like to call civilization.

Again, ideals are just that. Goal posts for reality. Communist China is on your left. Somalia is on your right (no government to "ruin" their markets). I'd rather be leaning to the left if I can't shoot straight down the middle.

Re:I think the big questions are "big"

[MightyMartian]

Sadly, ludicrous stories can gain ground incredibly quickly (look up urban legends). Ignoring for the moment the fact that we have no actual first hand accounts of any of the events (the Gospels are highly problematic and the earliest was written down decades after the events). Even sources like Josephus (which really is the only other source outside the New Testament which mentions Jesus), discounting where his work was tampered with later on, only really mentions that the guy was a preacher from Nazareth.

Look at UFO conspiracy theories. People believe whacky things, and can often believe them fervently even in the face of insurmountable evidence to the oontrary. We live in a supposed age of reason and enlightenment and people can still see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, so go back 2,000 years to a time when rulers of major empires would make decisions by cutting open animals and reading their entrails. I can well believe that hysteria and extreme devotion could then, just as powerfully (if not moreso) generate the kinds of fantastical stories that ultimately got recorded in the Gospels thirty or forty years after Jesus of Nazareth died.

The Mormons believe Joseph E. Smith was in congress with angels and recorded what he saw on metallic scrolls to make the Book of Mormon. Scientology is an even younger and equally absurd religion. It's the way people are.

But, at the end of the day, key to what I'm talking about is that the claim of Christ's divinity and resurrection have to be taken in the context of an infinite being which supposedly can do anything it wants. In that case, even what you directly observe could be called into question. There's simply no way to falsify any claim that starts with "God did it." The best you can do is a produce an explanation of greater parsimony and plead with an individual that no, God did not kill their cat and leave tire marks on its back, it's much more reasonable to infer that a car ran it over.

Landsberg's last book annoyed me enough

[rbrander]

I read his "More Sex is Safer Sex" and spent about half of it muttering "but you're ignoring a relevant factor...".

I see that the reviews at the Amazon page for that book:

http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-Safer-Unconventional-Economics/dp/1416532226/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2 [amazon.com] ...agree with my assessment. Give the first couple a quick skim before buying this one. Many of his arguments read like he started off with the intention of writing somethingn entertainingly contrarian and counter-intuitive, then assembled an argument to defend it. And, of course, a book author has the advantage of only taking on arguments that he himself allows in the book, gets to decide which factors of the problem are relevant, and so on.

I did pass the test the reviewer offers here: I had specific points at which I disagreed with his argument. But I didn't find that fun; it's no fun halting all agreement with an argument at step 4 and having to go on and read steps 5-9 while holding a little asterisk in your head that says "none of this matters because 4 is clearly wrong".

As an example, the heart of his "more sex is safer sex" argument used in the title is that overall risk is reduced if *certain* *people*, those with lower odds of having disease, have more sex. Then the people they have sex with are having safer sex than if with someone else. Alas, it rests on the contention that if the "safer" people have more sex, every act *displaces* another sexual interaction - the possibility that simply more sex will occur, the added interactions being safer, but *not* displacing a less-safe one, is not allowed for. Recommending that certain prudent people have more sex, while assuming that the amount of total sex in the world will remain a constant, is not, to my mind, a safe assumption. But it wasn't slashdot; all I could do was sit there, frustrated at my inability to argue with the book.

So I'll give this one a miss. Thanks anyway.

Re:"Big" question?

[ralphbecket]

I don't believe in a god in the same way I don't believe in unicorns.

All knowledge is contingent: at some level you have to believe things such as the past is a predictor of the future, that you can trust your senses, and so forth, in order to make any progress. Without such starting points it's hard to see how you could develop any kind of worthwhile philosophy.

There are an infinite number of things that might be or about which I might be mistaken, but I'm not going to act as though they do exist without good reason. I don't see atheist logicians and philosophers as being closed minded on the subject, they are just unconvinced by the arguments in favour of faith. Moreover, they explain precisely the problems with the arguments for theism as presented.