Author: VD

Waking up is hard

One of the world’s many deltas explains why taking the red pill of Game generates such anger in him and other men of similar mindset:

I felt like an idiot. I felt lied to. I felt cheated. I realized that I spent years of time and effort trying to be what I was taught to be a “good man” only to learn the assholes I held in contempt for treating woman so badly had it right all along! I had travelled the hard road, staying true to my morals on the belief that it was the right path only to learn that the same women who told me I was going to make some woman a great husband were sleeping with those same assholes! And those same women would cry on my shoulder when they got dumped. I felt used.

Nice guys usually do finish last. The primary reason is because they tend to take what women say literally and adjust their behavior accordingly, while bad boys pay no attention and do whatever they want. Ironically, the latter is much more attractive to women. There’s more at Alpha Game.

Perry sinks himself

You really have to be remarkably stupid to come out in rabid support of immigration when unemployment rates are effectively at 15.5 percent:

During Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum all took shots at Rick Perry’s record on illegal immigration. Bachmann said that Texas’s law allowing in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants acted like a “magnet” for illegal immigrants. Perry’s response was forceful and personal. “I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry told his critics.

“If you say that we should not educate children who come into our state for no other reason than that they’ve been brought their through no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart,” Perry said. “We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. I think that’s what Texans wanted to do. Out of 181 members of the Texas legislature when this issue came up [there were] only four dissenting votes. This was a state issue. Texas voted on it. And I still support it today.”

Texans don’t need to be educating Mexican children, they need to be sending them back to Mexico. This is simply an astonishing statement coming as it does on the heels of the report that 80 percent of the new jobs created in Texas over the last decade went to immigrants rather than Americans.

It’s clear that neither party has any desire to represent the interest of Americans. The Democrats are the anti-American, pro-Wall Street party while the Republicans are the pro-corporation, pro-Wall Street party. In either case, the interests of Americans are simply ignored, when they’re not being actively attacked. And it goes without saying that neither of them is going to do a damn thing about the ongoing economic catastrophe except to try to keep the banks afloat, both here and in Europe.

There goes another “constant”

And with it, apparently, the Standard Model of physics:

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, said that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

And, of course, this is a totally awesome discovery, because everyone knows what this means. HYPERSPACE! But is it even properly considered science, when it is “a totally unexpected finding”? Obviously, science will now be brought to bear on it, at least the replication aspect.

But what is the hypothesis for this faster-than-light neutrino movement that was being tested?

Immigration is good for jobs!

Yeah, not so much:

“Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal),” says the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates reduced levels of both legal and illegal immigration. The report estimates that about 40 percent of the new jobs were taken by illegal immigrants, while 40 percent were taken by legal immigrants. The vast majority of both groups, legal and illegal, were not American citizens.

It never ceases to amaze me how politicians and economists alike insist on demonstrating that they don’t understand Economics 101. What happens when you increase the supply of labor while demand is flat-to-negative? The price goes down. Great for corporations, not so great for actual people who need to support their families. Immigration, legal and illegal, is a major part of why so many Americans are out of work while corporate profits are doing very well despite the depression.

PZ Myers Memorial Debate Round Two: The Judges

Curiouser and curiouser! The debate begins to sharpen and come into focus in the second round and we have a fascinating difference of opinion among the three judges as they pronounce their collective verdict.

CL: Vox did not persuasively demonstrate his argument from moral evil. Dominic failed to show A3 and B3 false. B4 seems irrevocably tied to subjectivity hence still up for grabs. Dominic did not persuasively demonstrate his hypothesis that the first attempt at an explanation is almost invariably correct, nor did he attempt to account for the fact that testimony is distinct from explanation. I declare this round a draw. (For CL’s complete analysis of Round 2, visit The Warfare Is Mental.)

Alex Amenos: Gods and Flying Saucers – round to Vox, with bonus points to both participants for not making me declare whether I take Erich von Daniken seriously;

Evil Detection – edge to Vox;

The first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong – if not an altogether new argument, this is at least a very different presentation of the round 1 argument, and accordingly I prefer to give Vox an opportunity to respond before offering any further judgment.

Good show, gents. Overall I give the round to Vox. His argument is (thus far) the more tightly constructed of the two. If anyone following the debate is interested in trudging through my expanded commentary, just say the word in the comments and we’ll make arrangements.

Scott Scheule: Again, I’m very grateful to both debaters for inviting me to judge their contributions. And again, my criticisms are testament to the respect I have for both. And so no one need read all the way through my commentary, in the end, I award the round to Dominic.

Round 2 – Vox’s Statement
Judgement and Decision – Scott Scheule

Vox begins by addressing some of the complaints various commenters (and judges) have had with the topic of the debate. To be clear, I don’t question whether the topic of the debate is being adhered to–only whether it is an adequate topic of debate if it would allow in, inter alia, space aliens.

Day clarifies that the similarity between gods and advanced non-godly creatures is merely to show the failure of the materialist metric that cannot tell the two apart. Fair enough. It may also be a failure in the specificity of our definitions.

Says Day: “The failure of science to detect supernatural gods is no more significant than its failure to detect natural aliens, and combined with the potential for confusing the two, this means science is an intrinsically unreliable means of determining what historical evidence for the existence of gods and/or aliens is valid and what is not. Therefore, the science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging the mass of available historical evidence for gods.”

Some of the language is ambiguous here. Day’s conclusion that the “science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging the mass of available historical evidence for gods” is correct so far as it means the “science-based materialist consensus is incapable of judging whether the mass of available historical evidence is specifically for gods, or for aliens.” The wider conclusion that some readings would supply: “science can’t deal with the historical evidence for gods, full stop” is too ambitious.

Day reiterates his previous metaphor with the Aztecs, which, with the provisos I allowed previously, is still good. He says the analogy understates the actual situation because ” a) not all individuals living in the era of modern science are scientists and b) not all scientists operate in fields that potentially concern the detection of gods.” He develops this theme at length, using a clever example about the okapi, statistics about the prevalence of scientists in the population, and dark matter. He actually understates his case here, by only considering dark matter and not dark energy. When considering energy as well, the amount of energy/matter in the universe we’ve actually been able to detect is a mere 4%.

I wholeheartedly agree it’s amazing how little we know.

Day disputes my point that “as our ability to measure reality and record history has improved, our evidence for the supernatural has begun to wane.” He uses Dominic’s evidence of aliens as a counterexample (it matters not that aliens are not gods, since science can’t distinguish the two, it might be and we wouldn’t know). I do not find this at all convincing. Yes, there are UFO sightings, but I have never heard any particularly reliable account that didn’t seem anywhere near as plausible, anywhere near as 1% as plausible, as alternate explanations such as lying or hallucination.

Day makes the observation that the vast majority of those who claim not to believe in evil nevertheless act as if they do. I don’t know what evidence he could have for this. Take two people, one who believes murder is objectively bad, and another who believes murder is abhorrent, but only subjectively. Both people could act identically, and we’d have no means of telling who was who unless we questioned them on the issue. I never eat eggplant, because I hate it. Someone who believed eating eggplant was evil would presumably act much like I do. That’s no proof that I actually believe in the evilness of eating eggplant.

But I granted most believe morality is objective, even if I don’t, so we can skip over this. Day argues that evil requires an actor, an event, and a sensate victim. Day argues consciousness is also required. This is all fine.

Day then says consciousness is beyond current science. I agree. Nonetheless, there are other solutions that save materialism here: Dennett’s view that consciousness is a persistent illusion would solve the problem as well as any, if only it could take account of the rather large datum of the first-person perspective. McGinn’s mysterianism would also leave us with materialism. But I won’t harp on these, as I don’t find them persuasive.

At any rate, after some exploration of the issue, we come to the issue of whether morality is internal or external. Day’s evidence here strikes me as weak. That psychoanalysis fails to provide a consistent account of morality is true, but not news. Modern accounts of morality using game theory and evolutionary psychology are stronger candidates. Day’s statement that the rapid rate of evolution of morality in the US and the overall uniformity in moral senses across societies otherwise separated is unexplainable by materialism is an assertion I see no reason to accept. If our moral sensibilities had simply evolved before the large scale dispersion of the human race, then it’s no more surprising that we should have the same morality than that we should all be interested in heterosexual sex.

As to the rapid evolution of morality lately: fashion sense has evolved rapidly at the same time, yet I’ve met few who would argue therefore that fashion must have an external non-material source. I’m not sure what sort of morality we would expect if it were entirely material or internal, and if it would differ from what we observe.

Nonetheless, as I’ve conceded, most don’t agree with me. Some will even be unnerved that I would compare morality with clothing fashion. So I’ll proceed with the axiom that morality is objective.

And so I’ll accept Day’s argument, arguendo, that as morality is as arbitrary and constant as any of the physical laws, we can say it’s a similar law. But, I suppose in contradistinction to many, I have no problem accepting something as a brute fact. I’m afraid I just don’t see the force of the argument: laws exist, thus a lawgiver is necessary. This seems to me almost an equivocation on the term “law”: which means something quite different in the cases of the Internal Revenue Code vs. F = MA.

Rebuttal Round 2 – Dominic Saltarelli

Dominic formalizes the logic of the debate. I agree with his presentation of A. I’ve given reason why I think B doesn’t succeed, even as plotted. He goes on to attack necessary planks in both arguments.

Dominic says he wasn’t arguing aliens existed, only that the evidence is on a par with evidence for gods. The implication is Dominic thinks the evidence is weak for aliens: yet Day has taken it as support for his argument in his contribution above. There’s a disagreement obviously on the validity of such evidence.

Dominic argues that the extraordinary nature of testimony for gods makes it different from other testimonial evidence, and more akin to alien encounters. I agree. Indeed, Day seems to agree as well. The only difference is Dominic (and I) think this is a shot against the evidence for gods, Day the opposite. So there’s a prior parties are bringing to the table in which they differ: their personal views of testimony of alien encounters.

Dominic says that Day’s Aztec metaphor is obfuscation. I disagree. It’s simply not relevant to this branch of the argument. That alien encounters continue the evidence for ancient gods would be one reason to not deny the evidence of past encounters with gods (says Day). But that gods may simply be absent, in much the same way whites were from Aztecs, is another independent defense of past testimonial evidence (and a better defense). And Dominic seems to concede the point here: he says it would be silly for Aztecs to deny the existence of white men. Is he thus admitting it would be similarly silly to deny the existence of gods? Again, Dominic seems to be arguing for agnosticism, not atheism.

Dominic demands evidence of aliens or gods that arises independently of the cultural milieu it supports. Fair enough. How about a risen Christ from people whose only conception of resurrection was to be at the end of days?

Were I Day, my response would be something along the line of sure, people will color their experiences with the divine with trappings taken from their culture. But that’s just them trying to understand something far beyond their ken. People who first saw the sun imagined it was a guy in a chariot. Nevertheless, that they put it in terms of the familiar doesn’t show the sun doesn’t exist.

Dominic argues that morality is not objective, and moreover, Vox has admitted as much: Vox, says he, admitted it could be an implant and that gave the game away. Well no, not exactly. The game is who’s the more likely implanter, evolution or God or some tertium quid.

Dominic argues morality, contra Vox (at times), does change often.

I find something distinctly weird in both disputers here. See, if morality is just another evolved chunk of us, we would expect uniformity in it. So I would expect Dominic to be arguing for a stable morality. And if morality is just hanging out there, perfected, then I would expect our morality to change to more closely approximate that ideal morality with time, in the same way our understanding of physical laws has changed with time–thus I’d expect Vox to argue for a fluid morality. But both are doing the opposite, at least at times.

Dominic then argues vengeance disproves a stable morality. I don’t find this at all convincing. Dominic seems to think calling vengeance an exception to the general law against, e.g., murder, is somehow to give up the claim that morality is objective. I can’t see why, anymore than granting the law that things fall at the same rate has an exception when there’s air resistance gives up the objective existence of gravity.

In sum, I think the testimonial evidence criticism does invalidate argument A. I don’t think B goes through because B1 is false. Even if B1 is true, I don’t think the law requires a lawgiver, so I don’t think B goes through. But Dominic’s arguments have been against B3 and B4, and I’m not convinced either criticism has been sound.

Still, we need a positive argument to get to atheism, which Dominic presents. It is simply his weird argument again. I will state my first response, which I still feel works.

“Moreover, simple strangeness doesn’t really bear on the issue of theism vs. atheism. Yes, it may be reality is much stranger than imagined. But that reality may have a God or may not. If there is a God, then He may well be something far stranger than anything we’ve imagined… Or there may be no God, and reality is alone, far stranger than anticipated…”

Dominic says his point was that the first explanation is usually wrong. Well, yeah. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a second explanation. When the first explanation works, we pay no attention. That gods were the first explanation seems a gross simplification. And it’s not exactly like others didn’t try materialism as an early explanation either. See De Rerum Natura.

What’s subjective is the guess at what the next explanation, the successful one, the weird one, will be. Dominic’s got a hunch it’s an atheistic explanation. Here’s my original explanation, altered to face Dominic’s revision:

“Moreover, the simple wrongness of the first explanation doesn’t bear on the issue of theism vs. atheism. It may be that the second, weirder explanation involves a god. It may be that the second, weirder explanation doesn’t involve a god. Still weird, still second, still correct in either case.”

Dominic argues that the existence of other gods not thus far touched upon is beyond the scope of the debate. I have no idea if this is true or not. The only topic I’ve seen thus far is “The first PZ Myers Memorial Debate features Dominic Saltarelli vs Vox Day and concerns the evidence and logic for the existence or nonexistence of gods.” That’s vague, but “gods” suggests a fairly wide net. Moreover Day seems quite explicit that he’s talking about as many gods as possible. The debaters are welcome to clarify the topic.

In sum, Day’s A argument fails, the B argument fails, but I’m less certain about that, and Dominic’s positive argument that there are no gods fails as well. We’re left with agnosticism, which I suppose, to be cheerful about it, means both parties lose.

Still, all in all, I think Dominic made the better case.

So, we have one vote for Dominic, one vote for Vox, and one vote for a draw. That makes Round Two a draw! Dominic has decided that for Round Three, he will present the next argument and I will write the rebuttal. The current score is Vox 4.5, Dominic 1.5.

The devolution of economics

It’s not just scientists convinced of the universal superiority of their method who are deluded. Tim Price cites an amusing example of the extraordinary arrogance of economists:

“Most economists, it seems, believe strongly in their own superior intelligence and take themselves far too seriously. In his open letter of 22 July 2001 to Joseph Stiglitz, Kenneth Rogoff identified this problem. “One of my favourite stories from that era is a lunch with you and our former colleague, Carl Shapiro, at which the two of you started discussing whether Paul Volcker merited your vote for a tenured appointment at Princeton. At one point, you turned to me and said, “Ken, you used to work for Volcker at the Fed. Tell me, is he really smart ?” I responded something to the effect of, “Well, he was arguably the greatest Federal Reserve Chairman of the twentieth century.” To which you replied, “But is he smart like us?”

The thing is, most economists are extremely intelligent, particularly the more influential ones. One of the remarkable things about Rothbard’s history of economic thought is the way most – not some, most – of the significant economic theoreticians prior to the academic professionalization of the field had extremely successful careers in business, politics, or the Church. And their theoretical influence in most cases cannot be a considered a consequence of their societal success, because their theoretical writings tended to precede their obtainment of societally significant positions. The publications were, in fact, not infrequently the reason for their appointment to such positions.

The ironic thing is that the credentialization of the field has tended to reduce the power and influence of even the most intelligent economists, dumb down the general consensus, and permit the elevation of the less gifted at the expense of the more talented. One could not go so far as to say that Mises and Rothbard wasted their many decades in an unappreciative academy, given their massive literary output, but they were certainly far less materially influential than the economic theoreticians of yore who were elected to Parliament, handed control of monopolies like the East India Company, appointed Controller General of Finances by foreign countries, or given a royal charter to establish a central bank.

Now, one cannot read the heavily credentialed Paul Krugman on a regular basis without noticing that his arrogance is not supported by the intelligence of his political commentary, the accuracy of his economic predictions, or even the breadth of his theoretical knowledge. The decline of economics is especially apparent when one realizes that many of his arguments were anticipated and rebutted by men like John Locke in the 17th century.

Locke superbly put his finger on the supposed function of the Mint: to maintain the currency as purely a definition, or standard of weight of silver; any debasement, any change of standards, would be as arbitrary, fraudulent, and unjust as the government’s changing the definition of a foot or a yard. Locke put it dramatically: ‘one may as rationally hope to lengthen a foot by dividing it into fifteen parts instead of twelve, and calling them inches…’.

“Furthermore, government, the supported guarantor of contracts, thereby leads in contract-breaking: The reason why it should not be changed is this: because the public authority is guarantee for the performance of all legal contracts. But men are absolved from the performance of their legal contracts, if the quantity of silver under settled and legal denominations be altered… the landlord here and creditor are each defrauded of twenty percent of what they contracted for and is their due…”

This is precisely what Karl Denninger keeps banging on about at the Market Ticker when he points out how the Federal Reserve’s low inflation targets are in blatant contradiction to their charter to maintain price stability. As for Walras, whose neoclassical general-equilibrium theory is still in the process of being methodically dismantled and rubbished along with other classical fossils such as Ricardian free trade theory, the flaws in his perspective were presaged in Richard Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, published in 1730.

There is no question that economists are highly intelligent. It requires a high degree of intelligence in order to produce such a vast and convincing body of literature rationalizing politically useful concepts that have been known to be false for more than 300 years.

Those who don’t know history

One of the most startling things about reading Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is how old many of the issues presently being discussed today are. Consider the following passage in light of the FOMC meeting today:

Josiah Child’s pamphlet and his testimony before Parliament were centrepieces of the debate swirling around the proposal. Child’s critics pointed out effectively that low interest in a country is the effect of plentiful savings and of prosperity, and not their cause. Thus, Edward Waller, during the House of Commons debate, pointed out that ‘it is with money as it is with other commodities, when they are most plentiful then they are cheapest, so make money [savings] plentiful and the interest will be low’. Colonel Silius Titus pressed on to demonstrate that, since low interest is the consequence and not the cause of wealth, any maximum usury law would be counterproductive: for by outlawing currently legal loans, ‘its effect would be to make usurers call in their loans. Traders would be ruined, and mortgages foreclosed; gentlemen who needed to borrow would be forced to break the law….’

Child feebly replied to his critics that usurers would never not lend their money, that they were forced to take the legal maximum or lump it. On the idea that low interest was an effect not a cause, Child merely recited the previous times that English government had forced interest lower, from 10 to 8 to 6 per cent. Why not then a step further? Child, of course, did not deign to take the scenario further and ask why the state did not have the power to force the interest rate down to zero.

Notice that these critics of artificially low interest rates already knew in 1668 what Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve still deny today. Force interest rates too low and the result will not be an increase in loans and subsequent business activity, but a rather reduction in the number of loans, decreasing business activity, and even an increase in the number of mortgage foreclosures.

It’s hardly possible to claim that the outcome was unforeseeable, much less some sort of black swan, when it was foreseen 342 years ago, more than 100 years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. I cannot recommend APHET enough. It is the absolute gold standard of economic history and I have been astonished how many of the core concepts I was taught were developed decades after Adam Smith actually preceded the man by centuries. And I finally understand why Schumpeter thought rather more highly of Turgot than Smith in his excellent History of Economic Analysis. I haven’t finished APHET yet, but I have already learned more economic history from this monumental two-volume work than I did from the works of Friedman, Schumpeter, and Hayek combined.

In related news, the Federal Reserve announced the following: “The Committee also decided to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions–including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run–are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013.”

And by “exceptionally low”, they actually mean “artificially low”, you understand. It seems relevant to cite the way Rothbard noted that the anticipated bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures weren’t the only expected result from the forced lowering of the interest rate.

Even more revealing was Child’s reply to the charge of the author of Interest of Money Mistaken that Child was trying to ‘engross all trade into the hands of a few rich merchants who have money enough of their own to trade with, to the excluding of all young men that want it’. Child replied to that shrewd thrust that, on the contrary, his East India Company was not in need of a low rate since it could borrow as much money as it pleased at 4 per cent. But that of course is precisely the point. Sir Josiah Child and his ilk were eager to push down the rate of interest below the free market level in order to create a shortage of credit, and thereby to ration credit to the prime borrowers – to large firms who could afford to pay 4 per cent or less and away from more speculative borrowers. It was precisely because Child knew full well that a forced lowering of interest rates would indeed ‘engross all trade into the hands of a few rich merchants’ that Child and his colleagues were so eager to put this mercantilist measure into effect.

Translation: if you’re concerned about growing income inequality, then you should support higher interest rates, not rates that the central bank has artificially forced down to zero.

Mailvox: holding scientists accountable

BT wonders if the Italians are taking a science fetish one step too far in holding scientists accountable for their failure to correctly predict an imminent earthquake:

I know you are skeptical about the scientific community. But don’t you think that this is an extreme step- unless somebody can prove that they deliberately did not carry out their duties, isn’t it unfair to expect them to be superknowledgible? Can we see this as a result of the secular society going too far by putting science in an infallible pedestal that they are now expecting the scientists to answer every question? Just like may be how the priest sorcerer would have been held accountable for any “false prophesies” in the old clans on questions of winning battles or where to cultivate?

This actually represents an interesting attack on Naturalism. If we are to take the Naturalist perspective, which insists that science is not only the “most reliable source of knowledge” but “the best description of reality”, then obviously scientists must be held more responsible than other individuals who depend entirely upon less reliable sources of knowledge such as personal experience, testimonial evidence, hearsay, and documented historical evidence.

If an accountant can be held liable for failing to properly advise his clients about the probable consequences of information he possesses on the basis of one of these less reliable sources of knowledge, than obviously scientists should similarly be held liable for their similar failures when damages are suffered by the public, especially when the public is paying their salaries.

It would certainly be interesting to see a scientist who subscribes to Naturalism, or more likely, a science fetishist, to simultaneously attempt to argue that a) science is the most reliable source of knowledge but b) scientists should not be held responsible for avoidable damages suffered by other parties caused due to the inherent unreliability of science.

It’s an intriguing question, because this dichotomy between claims made on the behalf of science and the legal responsibilities of those who utilize it fundamentally calls into account the basic validity of science as a source of knowledge.

In which life imitates Jane Austin

Congratulations to Crystal Lake and the Mad Aussie, who were married in a Land Down Under today. Best wishes to them both. I note that on a percentage basis, that makes this blog more successful than an estimated 95 percent of all Internet dating sites.

That reminds me that I’ll need a new slogan if I’m ever going to monetize the site. I can see where “I don’t expect you to agree. I don’t even expect you to understand.” could be seen as a little off-putting to the cheerfully ignorant masses. Although I’m not sure that “True love and color commentary on the economic apocalypse” is necessarily a whole lot better.