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jrodefeld posted:Austrians also use empiricism and observation, but not to refute the logical and necessary implications of human action. So if someone presents us with some study that purports to explain how raising the minimum wage has no adverse effect on employment, immediately we can deduce that there is something amiss with such a study, since it contradicts a basic axiom of economics. The disemployment effects of a marginal minimum wage hike might be small and hard to capture in a given empirical study, but it exists nonetheless and MUST exist. Outlawing jobs below an arbitrary wage rate must necessarily artificially limit the scope of potential economic transaction that humans can engage in. Is it possible that these disemployment effects can be concealed by a boost to the economy? It's ok to admit this, just call it a statist boost. I mean just because "Humans Act = Minimum wage kills jobs" doesn't mean it doesn't create jobs at the same time. Or do your a priori assumptions include a percentage spread?
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Oct 28, 2014 14:12
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jrodefeld posted:Scientific law established by the Austrian method, for example, proves that, all things being equal, that if you raise the price of a good less of it will be sold. This is not a hypothesis that requires constant testing. It is a necessary and logical implication of the fundamental axioms of human action. Now, empirical testing can and does bolster this reality, but it cannot falsify it. For example, suppose someone ran a test on a group of people and found that, on one occasion, that raising the price of a good actually increased sales. Would this invalidate that law? Of course not. It would be clear that some other factor was not adequately accounted for and controlled in the study. Either some other factor had indeed changed, or the study was undertaken for too brief a time period. Since you won't respond to posts longer than one paragraph, I'll ask you one quick question about this one. You said that it's irrefutable proof that, "all things being equal," the supply-demand curve is correct. Neglecting inelastic goods and services, what exactly leads you to believe that, when a society raises its minimum wage, all other things can remain equal? How can you compare two societies wherein one has a massive section of its labor base that has much higher disposable income than the other's?
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Oct 28, 2014 14:21
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I'm trying to understand the term "basic axiom of economics" in some other way than "LOL u basic."
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Oct 28, 2014 14:24
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Also by calling their interpretation of human psychology something that is so self-evident as to be axiomatic, aren't Austrians severely insulting the entire realms of psychological and social sciences? Psychologists and neurologists haven't nearly fully mapped out what makes people tick, but Austrians just barge in and claim that it's so obvious that they'll consider their theories to be a priori, irrefutable truths. Jrodefeld, if it's all so easy, why not go into neurology and win several Nobel Prizes? You're totally wasting your time on online forums when you could be illuminating the entirety of mankind, and starting a revolution in the understanding of the human psyche.
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Oct 28, 2014 14:27
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jrodefeld posted:This should be obvious but when we say that people who voluntarily engage in transactions with others expect to be made "better off" that does not have to be in terms of economics. People may get psychic satisfaction from making a transaction that, to them, outweigh the fact that they are made worse off economically speaking. In essence there is a reason why they looked at their available options for action and acted in the way they did. Nope, stop right here. You just weakened the Action Axiom into irrelevance. To quote Hodgepodge who said it better. Hodgepodge posted:For his purposes, however, this rule has to arise from the definition of the concepts involved in a manner which is so obvious as to be tautological once properly understood, and so to be impossible to contradict. This means that any action performed voluntarily must be the action which one preferred to take given how one evaluates the available actions and their consequences. To do otherwise is impossible, because "voluntary action" is defined as "an action which one consciously choses to perform based on one's preference among those actions which one understands to be available." Now that's all fine if you want to spout tautologies. But tautologies aren't axioms. Once you allow irrational or destructive motivations into some vague notion of "benefit" for both parties, then how do you get from here to say, the Austrian belief that banning coercion from human interactions must lead to the Best of All Possible Worlds? We can no longer say that freedom from coercion must translate to the most economically prosperous society once we've allowed economically harmful actions to meet the criteria of "If two people engage in a voluntary transaction, it must mean that both parties have reverse preference orders, meaning they both expect to be made better off." Under your weak formulation it's now logically possible that a society which imposes mandatory quarantines on those infected with Ebola is going to fare better than a society that doesn't and leaves it up to the individual preferences of Ebola victims, for example. You have also claimed elsewhere that anti-discrimination law is harmful (or at best unnecessary) because racism is an economic drag and thus will be disfavored by a free society of individuals acting in their rational self-interest. Yet now you've told us that rational self-interest can include a preference to satisfy emotional desires like spite and hatred over economic profitability, so once again it's logically possible that a majority (or wealthy minority) may choose to discriminate against another race because they judge the emotional satisfaction of keeping those darkies in their place to be worth refraining from taking advantage of the economic opportunities that exist in hiring or catering to black people. Okay now go on. Thus weakened into a tautology, how is the Action Axiom useful for deriving your theorem that banning coercion is always a benefit to society? VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 14:41
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Do they actually teach logic in an-cap college? Do they know that there is such a thing as the rules of inference? Logic can get into some really weird, abstract stuff. It's not just a tummy-feel of "this seems right to me."
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Oct 28, 2014 14:44
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Heavy neutrino posted:Jrodefeld, if it's all so easy, why not go into neurology and win several Nobel Prizes? Because statism. Like kryptonite, the smallest morsel of state power completely emasculates and nullifies all of the superpowers of Libertarian Man. I Am The Scum posted:Do they actually teach logic in an-cap college? Do they know that there is such a thing as the rules of inference? Well, the entire edifice of their logical system is based on an equivocation, so you tell me. Take the action axiom. As soon as it's challenged it immediately morphs into its fluffy harmless form of "humans do stuff! Are you saying humans don't do stuff? You have to admit that humans do stuff!", but then the second they think you're not looking then out come the claws and they're ripping into health codes or vehicle safety standards or something because "this government coercion is stopping me from engaging in voluntary economically beneficial transactions! Let me act in my rational self-interest!" "Oh and by the by, have I mentioned that apartheid must be a wondrous boon to the human race, or it wouldn't have required international coercion by the Jew-run United States and Europe to bring it to an end?" VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 15:01
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VitalSigns posted:Well, the entire edifice of their logical system is based on an equivocation, so you tell me. This is something I had been thinking about, as well. Take the definition of action posed by Mises earlier: quote:Action is purposeful behavior directed toward the attainment of ends in some future period which will involve the fulfillment of wants otherwise remaining unsatisfied. The other idea, that action is anything done with the mere expectation of being better off (in any sense whatsoever) will be "soft action." Now suppose I want to get to a concert in Nashville. I need to drive East to get there. Somewhere along my trip, however, I get turned around and start going West, without realizing it. Am I acting? According to "soft action," yes, I am. After all, I do expect that I will be better off (because I want to get to that concert), even though I actually will not. According to "strong action," however, I am not acting, because what I am doing will not actually "involve the fulfillment of wants." And this can get funny when you think of actions that are not ongoing or instantaneous, but involve two distinct periods of time. If I order something on Amazon, is that a strong action? It only involves "fulfillment of wants" when I receive the item. So the thing I was doing was not an action at that moment, but becomes one retroactively 48 hours later once the item arrives?
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Oct 28, 2014 15:29
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jrodefeld posted:The answer, clearly, is that there is some other entity that is distorting the market and providing entrepreneurs with faulty signals. That entity is the Federal Reserve. Why is this clear? Booms and busts existed before the federal reserve. I've got to say, pre hoc ergo propter hoc is a new one on me.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:39
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Also I want to point to the wiki page on the ad hoc hypothesis. A lot of J-Rod's fundamentals run afoul of it. I would quote choice bits but the whole thing is short and entirely appropriate.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:44
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Wait, the Federal Reserve caused the Panic of 1785? And the Copper Panic of 1789? Is the Fed so wicked it caused recessions on the USA over 100 years before it even existed?
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Oct 28, 2014 15:55
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Jesus Jrodefeld, is this what I'm going to wake up to every morning? You making a bunch of unsupported assertions that you have made and I've refuted multiple times before? Going by your previous history you'll probably ditch after this post or the next one, but what the hell.jrodefeld posted:The Austrians have the only coherent explanation of the business cycle itself. Your side might argue that we simply need to have government regulate the derivatives market more closely or bring back Glass Steagal or curtail corporate "greed" or some variation on such a theme. But, almost to a man, these mainstream economists support the Federal Reserve setting interest rates, they support inflation and credit expansion. Many of them explicitly call for more inflation and lower interest rates. If they truly understood the cause of the business cycle they would advocate the State refrain from doing these things, allow the interest rates to rise and allow the market to reallocate scarce resources and allow the bubble to deflate. If you wait longer, keep interest rates lower longer and continue to "stimulate" the economy and "fight" recessions with Keynesian prescriptions, you merely delay the inevitable and make the pain and suffering much worse when the crash finally comes. Yes, I would argue that we need to regulate derivatives and bring back Glass Steagal. I know you think that the economic crisis was caused by something something federal reserve, but to deny that OTC derivatives did not play the most telling part is to deny reality, something most of us are not okay with. As far as "greed" yeah, I find it funny that you put that in scary air quotes while refusing to acknowledge that the financial crash had a lot to do with ridiculous corporate greed. Go read a book about AIG, I recommend Matt Taibbi's Griftopia. There is a section in it where they talk about AIG Financial Products division. Joe Cassano, the head of AIGFP set a ridiculous goal, something like one trillion, and proceeded to lend in utterly insane ways in his effort to meet a purely greed based goal. Because of lack of regulation, AIG was able to sell tens of billions of dollars of unregulated credit default swaps, which are in essence insurance policies, without having any money to back it up. All of this was insanity of the highest order, but insanity which you don't care about because it doesn't play into your worldview. You are ignoring evidence of actual problems in favor of something something end the fed. Moreover, this entire paragraph is another example of you arguing from assertion. For a guy who loves his logic, you sure make a huge number of logical fallacies and jumps in your argumentative process. While I agree that artificially low interest rates can be a problem in certain circumstances, such as when they were initially put into the toilet by greenspan in the run up to the bubble, I would not argue that this was the sole or even primary cause of the financial collapse. quote:The thing that makes the Austrian economists uniquely qualified to claim to have correctly predicted the economic crisis is that they understand the cause of the boom and bust cycle, which starts with the manipulation of interest rates by the central bank. [Citation Needed]. You keep doing this and it is getting rather old. If you want to make an assertion that austrians are uniquely suited to work at McDonalds I'd ask you to prove it, and I surely want you to prove that they are uniquely qualified to predict the economic crises. More to the point, how does the austrian business cycle account for the fact that the boom bust cycle exists whether or not we have a central bank? A history of US recessions will show you that even during the free banking era where there was no federal currency or central bank, the US consistently had recessions and depressions. In fact, the number of recessions in the century before the great depression is almost exactly equal to the number of depressions after it. And this trend continues whether you look at the US, England, Canada, France, Germany, Greece or pretty much anywhere else. The Boom-Bust cycle is a trait of capitalism that is found in all capitalist societies and has little to nothing to do with the Federal Reserve in terms of causation. While you can occasionally pair up dates of recessions to federal reserve actions this is only because you can make any two things match up if you squint at them long enough. This is the exact same method used by 9/11 truthers. quote:Artificial credit expansion leads to lower interest rates which causing excess borrowing. The savings necessary to finance sustainable economic growth doesn't exist so businessmen undertake long term projects without the sufficient means to complete them. Nope. Small, measured inflation serves to force investment by making people lose money if it is simply left sitting around. quote:It is like a builder of a skyscraper who is constructing the building out of bricks. However he doesn't have enough bricks to complete the building. Would it be better for him to realize this sooner or later? Would you rather he have laid every last brick then realize he has squandered all that time and money on an unsustainable project and have to demolish the whole building? Of course it would be better for him to recognize the unsustainability of the enterprise sooner and cut his loses early. This is what the Austrians propose as the correct method of dealing with unsustainable booms in the economy. Your suggested method here, as an FYI, would have collapsed the global economy in such a way as to set humanity back a generation or more for no benefit, since everything else about your political ideology is flawed. Only an idiot or a zealot could have looked at the global financial crash of 2008 and say "Eh, just let the market work itself out." In 2008, commercial paper markets froze because of the collapse of major banks. What this means is that businesses could not do the regular borrowing that they do every single day to finance their practices. McDonalds couldn't borrow to pay for its payroll, Walmart couldn't borrow to buy inventory for its stores. What you are talking about isn't a market correction but a total failure of capitalism. In true austrian fashion you are ignoring the suffering of billions of people in your search for a market correction. quote:Let me ask you this then. You say that mainstream economists recognize the reality of the business cycle. Where do they think it comes from then? Can it be caused by greed? Surely if greed was the explanatory factor, we would be in a recession perpetually. The market has a way of leading towards some degree of equilibrium. Some businesses fail while others succeed every day. But what causes a whole cluster of error at the same time throughout entire sectors of the economy? Capitalism. To be more specific, the Boom Bust cycle is a function of the availability of credit. As banks begin to lend out more credit to finance more purchasing and investing we enter a boom cycle. Businesses are made, new ideas are explored. In many cases a boom like this is a relatively small endeavour, it goes on for a year or two and then the US returns to equilibrium, or goes into a small bust. Other times, such as with the dot com bubble, the boom becomes a bubble as ever more and more credit is given out in a greedy search for new investment opportunities. A bust, by contrast, is the retraction of credit. Less investment means less business creation, means fewer jobs and slower growth or recession. A large recession comes as a result of a deep retraction of credit, which is in turn caused by fear. Businesses become unsure about the financial markets, and that causes them to hold onto their money, in the grand scale you have something like the 2008 crash where financial markets freeze. No one wants to do business because they don't want to be the sucker holding the bag if things go sour, and they won't unfreeze until the fear goes away, either naturally over time, or through direct intervention. quote:The answer, clearly, is that there is some other entity that is distorting the market and providing entrepreneurs with faulty signals. That entity is the Federal Reserve. Again, we had over twenty recessions in the century preceding the creation of the federal reserve, something that should be impossible by your reading. quote:Interest rates are not some thing that technocrats can play with without consequence. The price of money is a vitally important signal to the economy. I agree, which is why we should just shrug and try to let the unregulated market decide. We did that for decades and we found that the volatility of money jumped around like a crackbaby and banks were constantly failing without things like the FDIC. People loved the Federal Reserve Dollar when it came into being because "Holy poo poo, stable money!" quote:In a healthy market economy, investments and loans are funded through savings. If there are a lot of savings, interest rates drop and more loans can be made and the economy expands. Importantly though since interest rates actually reflect the true degree of savings, these expansions are sustainable. The projects undertaken can be completed. In our market investments and loans are funded through savings. If you are arguing that fractional reserve banking distorts this then I would like to point out to you that prior to the introduction of the Fed, what we had was an absurd number of banks, each having its own policy and almost all of them engaging in fractional reserve lending. quote:On the other hand, if the savings and capital accumulation are depleted interest rates rise sharply and it costs far more to borrow money. This means that the brake is placed upon the creation of a bubble at the earliest possible opportunity. The entrepreneur is made aware of the lack of resources and he will choose not to expand his business at that particular time. This does not necessarily bear out in reality because individual banks can and would lie about the amount of money that they had in storage. We see examples of this even in modern day with unregulated libertopia exchanges such as Magic the Gathering Online: eXchange for bitcoin. quote:This is all very basic economics. However, all your favored economic thinkers fail to understand the deleterious role artificially set interest rates can have upon an economy. Actually most of my favorite economic thinkers are Marxists or technocrats who think that money is a quaint concept that will be done away with in the glorious utopia. You do not understand the cause of the business cycle. You think you do, but as I pointed out earlier, Austrian economics is on the outliers precisely because it cannot produce usable data or predictions about the economy. Your ideology doesn't get used because it is not useful in predicting things, which is why it is primarily practiced by cranks, racists and other dregs of society. I hope this helps. Pigbog posted:This might be off topic, but Caro you are really good at deconstructing lovely arguments and you write in a very accessible and entertaining way. Do you have a blog or do you write anywhere that I could read more? I don't sadly, but I probably could at some point. Always considered it to be honest. 
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Oct 28, 2014 16:13
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I've got to stop reading this thread before I go to sleep. I had the worst nightmares about non-Euclidian  chasing me screeching "Humans 'act'!"  How does the Action Axiom make coercion wrong, or inefficient or whatever? Isn't coercion is how one leverages others into carrying out your preferences over their own? Many hands make light work, and all that. I guess the same question goes for central planning (and states in general, I guess), why the big hate-on for it? It's just another tool for accomplishing goals in a rational manner. I thought the action axiom was cool with giving people awful choices, as long as there're choices. Play taxes or get slow sliced usually works out to a rational exchange of receiving money and retaining skin and extremities. Also, I still want to know about feudalism and Year Zero. BrandorKP posted:I like that you used "a shibboleth " to describe it.  I'm pretty sure the Ephraimites didn't say shibboleth, they said sibboleth, which was the point. Also why you don't see Ephraimites around anymore.So, if it is a shibboleth, then it doesn't have to hang together completely to be useful, because it has utility as a signal.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:23
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jrodefeld posted:This should be obvious but when we say that people who voluntarily engage in transactions with others expect to be made "better off" that does not have to be in terms of economics. People may get psychic satisfaction from making a transaction that, to them, outweigh the fact that they are made worse off economically speaking. In essence there is a reason why they looked at their available options for action and acted in the way they did. Each of us have preference orders for our possible actions. When we forgo certain potential actions in the economy for others we make a judgment that the action we chose is preferable to our other options. Preferable in a purely subjective sense, to us as individuals. I wish you'd post in the afternoon instead. Everyone always gets to the fun bits before I do.  The first thing I'd point out here is that if by "Better off" you can include things like psychic satisfaction, then the term becomes pretty much meaningless doesn't it? Your argument here is that clearly anytime someone makes a transaction it must be because they'll be better off. In the event that we don't see an obvious reason why they are better off we must assume there is some other reason we can't see, because otherwise it wouldn't make sense! People make irrational decisions all the time, and many times they make decisions that are actively harmful to them, or even decisions that they expect will not make them better off. quote:Yes it is true that the potential options for action for different people in different circumstances vary wildly, but that is not what is being argued in this case. So you get to set the rules for what are being argued now, as well as making bald faced assertions we have to accept as fact.  quote:We have already established the a priori fact of human action. Similarly, you must be forced to admit that there are certain axioms that logically follow from this fact. There are certain attributes to human action that can be proven through logic and reason, that cannot be refuted. As others have pointed out, oh my no. You know what let me just quote myself here: "Simply stating that they are decidedly different does not mean a goddamned thing. Argument from assertion. You literally just state that this is so and accept us to take it on fact despite knowing that it is something that we clearly find controversial. You are arguing in bad faith, which is not surprising." That is from a post on the last page about you doing this exact thing. You know we disagree, and you are making zero effort to engage with those disagreements. You are being intellectually dishonest and frankly it is pathetic. Moreover, this is just one more example of you being Anti-Science because you insist that your beliefs cannot be refuted, do you realize how insane that makes you look? quote:It is unlikely that I can fully explain the Austrian position and all the necessary implications of human action, but suffice to say that these a priori logical statements about action provide concrete laws with which to view economic phenomenon. As another poster already said, many disciplines make certain a priori assumptions that define the scope of their study before they go about their observations and empirical testing. Clearly this is the case, because every time you try, you fail. On the plus side the issue with this isn't you but is in fact the Austrian position, which is untenable and not based in reality. quote:Austrians also use empiricism and observation, but not to refute the logical and necessary implications of human action. So if someone presents us with some study that purports to explain how raising the minimum wage has no adverse effect on employment, immediately we can deduce that there is something amiss with such a study, since it contradicts a basic axiom of economics. The disemployment effects of a marginal minimum wage hike might be small and hard to capture in a given empirical study, but it exists nonetheless and MUST exist. Outlawing jobs below an arbitrary wage rate must necessarily artificially limit the scope of potential economic transaction that humans can engage in. I want to believe you are trolling here, that you aren't this... deluded, but I'm finding it hard to believe. I do however want you to re-read what you've just written here. If someone presents you with a study explaining how raising the minimum wage has no adverse effect on employment, you just ignore it. Clearly the study, not your logic, must be wrong. Does that sound like the actions of a sane person? Of a reasonable person? Of an inquisitive person interested in the truth? That sounds like a religious zealot's response to someone questioning the holy word of god. You are arguing that your position is unverifiable, and that while you accept evidence that proves the validity of austrian economics, you will reject anything that finds fault with it. You are arguing that your logic is more real than observable reality. What would it take to get you to understand how flawed this is? What if it was not one study, but one hundred, or a thousand? What if we jumped the minimum wage up to $10.10 and saw no job losses, what would be your reply then? Because that is what we are talking about, we are talking about observable reality disagreeing with your made up logic. You are arguing that if your logic says the sky is red, and we prove to you through science that the sky is in fact blue, that it is the science that is wrong. quote:To think otherwise is frankly ridiculous. What this all comes down to is merely a serious ignorance of the Austrian position on economics and human action. I know you would love nothing better than to dismiss libertarianism and Austrianism as a kooky cult that lacks any scientific rigor, but saying such things merely exposes your own ignorance of what the arguments actually are. Yes, your ideology lacks scientific rigor. Want to prove me wrong? Show me any other scientific discipline that asserts that its findings are not falsifiable on the grounds of real world evidence. Show me one. Edit: I just want to point this out because it is still bugging me. Jrodefeld, so much of science is not based on proving an idea, such as attempting to disprove it. Your ideology cuts off one half of science entirely by saying "You can't prove us wrong." and yet you accept us to believe it. That is loving crazy. Caros fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 16:28
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DrProsek posted:Wait, the Federal Reserve caused the Panic of 1785? And the Copper Panic of 1789? Is the Fed so wicked it caused recessions on the USA over 100 years before it even existed? The Federal Reserve is the Ur-Evil, the enemy of mankind. Since the dawn of time it has lurked jewishly in the shadows, destroying culture after culture. I bet your state-run schools taught you the Bronze Age Collapse was caused by the mysterious Peoples of the Sea, right? But your teachers kept hidden from you their identity: federal reserve bankers. All around the Mediterranean, their fiat-paper-hulled ships launched strikes upon those bronze-backed economies, bringing down fortifications with low interest rates and raining burning faulty economic signals upon the terrified entrepreneurs within, driving them to a frenzy of speculative misallocation and then laying waste to their cities with rate-hiking ballistas.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:43
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Link dumping and telling people to read them as your argument should be treated the same way plagiarism is in academia - a summary public execution.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:47
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Caros posted:I wish you'd post in the afternoon instead. Everyone always gets to the fun bits before I do. I feel your pain, man.  Also, I don't know why but Jrod's use of the word "psychic" seems rather odd to me. Emotional satisfaction would seem more consistent with what he's trying to say, although using a woo word like psychic is more consistent with his beliefs in magical free markets.
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Oct 28, 2014 17:52
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Chalets the Baka posted:Link dumping and telling people to read them as your argument should be treated the same way plagiarism is in academia - a summary public execution. It should merit a 24 probation, at least
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Oct 28, 2014 17:56
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Who What Now posted:I feel your pain, man. Libertarians are opposed to and completely incapable of understanding all forms of human emotion. 
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Oct 28, 2014 18:23
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Talmonis posted:Libertarians are opposed to and completely incapable of understanding all forms of human emotion. Mental satisfaction then. Psychic satisfaction just sounds like you're really proud of a good use of telekinesis.
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Oct 28, 2014 18:35
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Heavy neutrino posted:Also by calling their interpretation of human psychology something that is so self-evident as to be axiomatic, aren't Austrians severely insulting the entire realms of psychological and social sciences? Psychologists and neurologists haven't nearly fully mapped out what makes people tick, but Austrians just barge in and claim that it's so obvious that they'll consider their theories to be a priori, irrefutable truths. Funny you should mention this as sociology essentially rose as a counter to prevailing economic and social understanding of aggregate human behavior, particularly as it related to economics and capitalist power structures.
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Oct 28, 2014 18:44
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Caros, I would read your blog or whatever. I honestly wish I could sic you on on some of the folks clogging up my facebook feed, it's a pleasure to read.
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Oct 28, 2014 18:54
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I Am The Scum posted:Now suppose I want to get to a concert in Nashville. I need to drive East to get there. Somewhere along my trip, however, I get turned around and start going West, without realizing it. Am I acting? Anti-vaxx might be a good thought experiment here too. If I think I will benefit by not vaccinating myself or my children even though actually this is objectively harmful, am I acting? I Am The Scum posted:According to "strong action," however, I am not acting, because what I am doing will not actually "involve the fulfillment of wants." I Am The Scum posted:According to "soft action," yes, I am. After all, I do expect that I will be better off (because I want to get to that concert), even though I actually will not. This is von Mises' view. Human Action posted:Human action is necessarily always rational. The term "rational action" is therefore pleonastic and must be rejected as such. When applied to the ultimate ends of action, the terms rational and irrational are inappropriate and meaningless. The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic. Who are we to say whether the relief from anxienty and the satisfied smugness of not getting shots like all those sheeple isn't better than epidemics of measles and polio? All rights and wrongs are subjective and it's not for we, the praxeologists, to pass judgment on any goals anyone might choose, except of course for objective evils like a statist who disposes of his fellows' wills and aspirations and prevents pandemics with a mandatory vaccination program. Obviously.
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Oct 28, 2014 18:54
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Who What Now posted:Also, I don't know why but Jrod's use of the word "psychic" seems rather odd to me. Emotional satisfaction would seem more consistent with what he's trying to say, although using a woo word like psychic is more consistent with his beliefs in magical free markets. Pretty sure he's trying to say "psychological." VitalSigns posted:Anti-vaxx might be a good thought experiment here too. If I think I will benefit by not vaccinating myself or my children even though actually this is objectively harmful, am I acting? I think the anti-vaxx angle is far more prevalent and applicable, except that the movement, in its most basic form, is about inaction (literally, refraining from one specific activity). I Am The Scum fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 19:15
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jrodefeld posted:I know you would love nothing better than to dismiss libertarianism and Austrianism as a kooky cult that lacks any scientific rigor, but saying such things merely exposes your own ignorance of what the arguments actually are. I would like to just focus on this line. Austrians use a form of deduction that claims that its deductions cannot be falsified by observation. That isn't science; it's faith. Austrian economics actually rejects the scientific method, which by definition means that Austrian economics is a kooky cult that lacks any scientific rigor. Nothing that you've typed undoes that. At best, Austrian economics is a branch of philosophy, not science. Just so that I'm totally clear: if your school of thought states that conclusions cannot be invalidated by observation, then it lacks any scientific rigor. Full stop
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Oct 28, 2014 19:15
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I Am The Scum posted:I think the anti-vaxx angle is far more prescient and applicable, except that the movement, in its most basic form, is about inaction (literally, refraining from one specific activity). Mises does not consider this distinction important. For him, action consists of applying purposeful methods to achieve a goal. If your goal is to remain unvaccinated and you apply a conscious method to remain so, then that is action. It doesn't matter if this requires some affirmative act like saying "no, don't vaccinate me" or simply requires you to do nothing. Doing nothing is an action if by doing so you're intending to achieve some purpose that would be defeated by doing something else. Human Action posted:Action means the employment of means for the attainment of ends. As a rule one of the means employed is the acting man's labor. But this is not always the case. Under special conditions a word is all that is needed. He who gives orders or interdictions may act without any expenditure of labor. To talk or not to talk, to smile or to remain serious, may be action. To consume and to enjoy are no less action than to abstain from accessible consumption and enjoyment. He defines it in such a tautological way that you have to literally be a vegetable not to act. Even passively submitting to a vaccination is an action if you have the power to prevent it and decide not to. Not caring about getting vaccinated and then not doing it is an action because you could decide to care. You have to be drugged up or in a coma or something before von Mises would say you're doing inaction. I suppose it's also inaction if you're having a seizure or something and your convulsions are not under conscious control.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:36
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Regarding that post, I know what you're going to say: "VitalSigns, that's worse than useless. It's actively confusing to redefine common words this way with esoteric meanings unique to your personal philosophy!" Well yes, the muddle is the point. They draw you in by defining common words with an idiosyncratic technical narrow definition, then switch it later by slipping into the vague common alternate meanings for their technical terms. He also does this with the term "rational", as you saw above by redefining it to mean "the way humans think" rather than its common meaning of "based in fact and reason". That's how he gets you to agree that all humans are rational actors. Later on of course he'll equivocate on this, rational and action will take on their common meaning, and we'll  prove that government interference with actions must always lead to bad outcomes because it means forcing people to act contrary to fact and reason.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:48
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VitalSigns posted:Regarding that post, I know what you're going to say: "VitalSigns, that's worse than useless. It's actively confusing to redefine common words this way with esoteric meanings unique to your personal philosophy!" Well yes, the muddle is the point. They draw you in by defining common words with an idiosyncratic technical narrow definition, then switch it later by slipping into the vague common alternate meanings for their technical terms. One of the other ancaps to post here (I think his username was Socrates) did this as well, he defined "Inflation" as "Paper money" and was surprised when people looked at him funny for doing that.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:59
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VitalSigns posted:Regarding that post, I know what you're going to say: "VitalSigns, that's worse than useless. It's actively confusing to redefine common words this way with esoteric meanings unique to your personal philosophy!" Scientologists do this a lot by the way.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:21
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QuarkJets posted:I would like to just focus on this line. Austrians use a form of deduction that claims that its deductions cannot be falsified by observation. That isn't science; it's faith. Austrian economics actually rejects the scientific method, which by definition means that Austrian economics is a kooky cult that lacks any scientific rigor. Nothing that you've typed undoes that. At best, Austrian economics is a branch of philosophy, not science. That said, this is an appropriate critique of Austrianism. First, its alleged a priori axioms are highly questionable, which renders all inferences from them, deductive or otherwise, equally questionable. We can be wrong about supposed a priori truths when they are about the world, which is why there has been so much ink spilled about the whole analytic/synthetic distinction and the possibility of knowable a priori synthetic truths in general. One of the ways we know we're wrong about these things is when truth-preserving deductions from them don't pan out, that is, do not match empirical evidence. This seems pretty easily demonstrable with Austrianism. Second, even if all macroeconomical stuff is ultimately reducible to individual action in the way Austrianism suggests, we don't understand either the macro stuff or the mechanics of individual action well enough to presume to be axiomatic about either, let alone the rules that would govern the reduction of one to the other. And our most useful tools for increasing our understanding of all of these things are scientific ones, which are going to rely on standard scientific inductive practices including empirical falsifiability. Ignoring them in favor of some pretty shabby looking axioms is well...ignorant. A good thinker should always be more interested in getting her theory right than hanging on to any particular view, which is one of the reasons why Austrians catch so much flak - not just for having a flawed theory, but for rejecting possible solutions to the theory's flaws.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:23
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aparmenideanmonad posted:Rejection of the scientific method is not automatically ridiculous, as sometimes the brand of inductive reasoning used in science just doesn't apply. There's nothing structurally wrong with a view that has a priori axioms and involves deductive inferences from those axioms (aka, is immune to empirical falsification to some degree). Various systems in math and logic work this way and pretty much everyone agrees that they need to - scientific rigor is not some sort of final arbiter of a good theory in every single discipline. Reasoning is useful in developing systems that need to be internally consistent, but not useful in developing systems that actually mirror reality (however, once you have a system that you can be reasonable sure matches reality, you can make quite a bit of progress with logic and reasoning... but going back to make sure it still accurately mirrors once you are done is important). You can safely reject the scientific method if you're developing theoretical systems that do not seek to state that this is how things are - See: Mathematics, and how empiricism actually lead us to change many of its axioms when we started applying it to situations where it didn't map to reality. There are a whole lot of mathematical system, many quite interesting, based on axioms that are quite clearly not true of our reality. Basically, throwing away the scientific method, but using rigorous logic, let's you describe a coherent idea of how things could work, but is pretty useless in declaring how things do work.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:38
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DarklyDreaming posted:One of the other ancaps to post here (I think his username was Socrates) did this as well, he defined "Inflation" as "Paper money" and was surprised when people looked at him funny for doing that. Yeah. There's another hidden one in the Action Axiom as well which jrodefeld uses to rhetorical effect (which other posters have pointed out). "Humans Act" is an ambiguous statement. It could mean "All humans act* all the time" or "Humans act sometimes". Denying the second version means asserting the negative "Humans never act", so whenever it is questioned, jrodefeld selects this meaning and accuses the questioner of contradicting herself by acting while claiming not to be doing so. However, "Humans act sometimes" isn't very useful, much like you can't prove much starting from the geometric postulate "Through any two points there is exactly one line, but you know maybe not, just kinda depends". You can no longer say a priori that government intervention always compels people to act in contravention to their desires. Maybe the people in question are infants who are unvaccinated because they can't act and intervention is beneficial to them and they'll appreciate it once they're older. Maybe the people in question are busy consumers without the time, knowledge, or resources to inspect the entire supply chain of their food but they still need to eat, so even though they're voluntarily consuming tainted foods it is not their conscious goal and a regulatory regime would actually do a better job fulfilling their desires. Maybe they are daughters of religious fundamentalists and the decision not to learn to read was made by their parents even though they would prefer it if the government required their parents to send them to school. But of course, by the time we get there, jrodefeld has already switched to the "All humans act (all the time)" version of the Axiom, thus everything in the economy is a result of human action according to their chosen goals, which government intervention can only frustrate and defeat to the detriment of the people, and any objection will be shouted down because "You already agreed to the action axiom, I'm not going over it again!" *And we've already defined all human action as rational, so rational human action would be redundant.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:55
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GlyphGryph posted:Reasoning is useful in developing systems that need to be internally consistent, but not useful in developing systems that actually mirror reality (however, once you have a system that you can be reasonable sure matches reality, you can make quite a bit of progress with logic and reasoning... but going back to make sure it still accurately mirrors once you are done is important). You can safely reject the scientific method if you're developing theoretical systems that do not seek to state that this is how things are - See: Mathematics, and how empiricism actually lead us to change many of its axioms when we started applying it to situations where it didn't map to reality. There are a whole lot of mathematical system, many quite interesting, based on axioms that are quite clearly not true of our reality. A few nitpicks: 1. Reasoning is useful in all cases and comes in lots of different varieties: deduction, induction, abduction, and all sorts that are either subspecies or modifications of these three. Science largely uses the two latter categories while math and logic focus primarily on the former. Blanket statements about "reasoning" when you're talking about logic and science will get you into trouble. 2. You seem to be suggesting something like: science has shown that certain mathematical axioms are false. This is incorrect. Mathematics is not about the way things are in the physical world, which is why it's not empirically falsifiable (this is somewhat contentious but even people who think mathematical objects are real typically don't think they're physical - see Platonism). However, not all mathematical systems can be applied to the physical world in ways that are useful, which is why we discard axioms and entire mathematical systems based on things like the findings of physics - we're not saying the axiom or system is false, we're saying it doesn't apply properly/usefully. Empirical checking is absolutely important to discover which mathematical systems are the useful ones, but it's not a useful tool for mathematical (or logical) proof/disproof.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:08
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WilliamAnderson posted:So, this is dumb, but why do austrian schoolers have such an obsession with math? I assume they don't understand that the analogies they make are false? Like, I really don't get it. The idea that anything can be determined from axioms that never need to be revised seems pretty dumb! Austrians actually reject mathematical formalization of their logical system, it's one of the two enemies of praexology (the other is of course empiricism). quote:First, there is the process of deduction; why are the means verbal rather than mathematical logic? Without setting forth the comprehensive Austrian case against mathematical economics, one point can immediately be made: let the reader take the implications of the concept of action as developed so far in this paper and try to place them in mathematical form. And even if that could be done, what would have been accomplished except a drastic loss in meaning at each step of the deductive process? Mathematical logic is appropriate to physics — the science that has become the model science, which modern positivists and empiricists believe all other social and physical sciences should emulate. In physics the axioms and therefore the deductions are in themselves purely formal and only acquire meaning "operationally" insofar as they can explain and predict given facts. On the contrary, in praxeology, in the analysis of human action, the axioms themselves are known to be true and meaningful. As a result, each verbal step-by-step deduction is also true and meaningful; for it is the great quality of verbal propositions that each one is meaningful, whereas mathematical symbols are not meaningful in themselves.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:17
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aparmenideanmonad posted:I agree that pure deductive reasoning is highly limited in both proper domain as well as insight provided, but the point of my post was to show that it's entirely possible for a theory to be axiomatic, deductive, about the world, and correct. I wasn't suggesting that we have any such theories or that it would be a good method for finding stuff out about the world, which is why I went on to criticize Austrianism for purporting to be such a theory. While I'm admittedly not the biggest expert on mathematics or science in general, I have to ask. Do you have an example of something that is logically true, but that would not be subject to falsification based on real world evidence? I'm having a little trouble trying to follow your point exactly and I'm hoping for clarification. Because from what you've posted so far, this seems to be meaningless distinction so far. If you can logic up an idea that supposedly describes the real, physical world but which proves to be false, then it seems to me that the logic and axioms that derived it are wrong, or at the very least worthless and not worth discussing, aren't they?
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Oct 28, 2014 21:22
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Soviet Space Dog posted:Austrians actually reject mathematical formalization of their logical system, it's one of the two enemies of praexology This is entirely unsurprising since, as much as they like to claim they're using the same methods as mathematicians, mathematical proofs require rigour (ie, precise definitions and no reliance upon unstated axioms), whereas praxeology depends cheifly on equivocation and hidden assumptions, even before you get the whole "empirically wrong" part. Caros posted:While I'm admittedly not the biggest expert on mathematics or science in general, I have to ask. Do you have an example of something that is logically true, but that would not be subject to falsification based on real world evidence? I'm having a little trouble trying to follow your point exactly and I'm hoping for clarification. I think what he's saying is that just because a theory is deduced from first principles, that's not a reason to assume it must be wrong. It's entirely possible that it could be right (that it does correctly describe the real world). It's just that since there's no way to tell the difference between a logical, consistent, factual a priori theory and a logical, consistent, afactual a priori theory without reference to experience, it's probably still a good idea practically speaking to verify it before relying on it. For example, one of the basic postulates of physics is translation invariance. The laws of physics don't change with absolute position: they are the same here on earth as on the moon as at the farthest reaches of the universe (also time invariance, the laws of physics won't be different tomorrow). It doesn't have to be true, and there's no proof that it is, but it's necessary for our physics to function. We also are very resistant to revising it in the face of empirical data. For example if we find (and we have) that the motion of galaxies deviates from what general relativity predicts, we could say "Oh well maybe gravity obeys different laws out there" but you know, we don't want to. So first we look for other factors like gravitational influence from extra matter that we can't see because it's not shiny like stars. But just because general relativity rests on this (and other) arbitrary axioms is not good enough reason to reject it as voodoo. We just need to keep in mind that alternate systems based on alternate axioms exist and look for ways to distinguish between ones that describe our reality and ones that don't. Much like we did when we found that our common-sense Newtonian axiom of absolute space, time, and velocities failed to describe the world as well as Eisntein's system of relativity which assumes that only the speed of light appears constant to all observers.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:52
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aparmenideanmonad posted:Rejection of the scientific method is not automatically ridiculous, as sometimes the brand of inductive reasoning used in science just doesn't apply. There's nothing structurally wrong with a view that has a priori axioms and involves deductive inferences from those axioms (aka, is immune to empirical falsification to some degree). Various systems in math and logic work this way and pretty much everyone agrees that they need to - scientific rigor is not some sort of final arbiter of a good theory in every single discipline. Jrod claimed that Austrian economics is scientific, and I pointed out that a philosophy which claims that it cannot be tested by observation is the opposite of scientific. So did you not read jrod's post, or did you not read mine?
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Oct 28, 2014 22:16
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Caros posted:While I'm admittedly not the biggest expert on mathematics or science in general, I have to ask. Do you have an example of something that is logically true, but that would not be subject to falsification based on real world evidence? I'm having a little trouble trying to follow your point exactly and I'm hoping for clarification. Basically all of mathematics is like this. Mathematics can model real world phenomena. However, math is mostly about finding results along the line of "given these logical premises, this logical conclusion." Which doesn't in itself say anything about the world. It does allow you to make reasonable predictions about situations in the world which look an awful lot like the mathematical model you're working with. When the model doesn't work for whatever situation, the results concerning that model are still valid, it's just that maybe we should come up with some other sort of model if we want to tackle this other problem. It's two different things that touch each other. Mathematics is concerned with pure reason, but the things about which we reason are often informed by empiricism. And, empiricism is informed by mathematics. 1 + 1 = 2 is a result which is used in real life, but numbers are, in the end, just an abstract concept. If you took an apple and put it next to another apple and then you had 3 apples, that doesn't contradict what is known to be true of numbers. It just means that maybe numbers aren't a good way to model apples.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:16
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Dr. Stab posted:If you took There we go.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:27
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So it's a map analogy. You can argue all day about the map projection or the calligraphy or whatever, and they're important, but what determines a good map is not getting lost or et by dragons  VitalSigns posted:There we go.  Humans act. Cardassians control. Are we just too alien to communicate with each other? Wasn't there a Voltaire quote about how all the incorrect speculation in the world won't change when Hailey's Comet returns, which is why astro
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Oct 29, 2014 01:26
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