I expect its worse then politics inturpting the left from appling evoluton.
I think its closer to how schools ruin reading and math thru rote nonsense. I doubt 1 in 1000 ever had a concept of evolution in thier head. No different from teaching algerba as rules and rituals rather then, anything coherent and memorable.
Im not commenting on american religion or whatever, its mandated that evolution was in my science textbooks. Its a civilization wide problem that everyone overly focused on safety, holistic knowledge is down played, and teaching children by rote was invited by Germany for a simpler example how many people understand cos and sin, they may know by memorization the algebra they teach, but I bet 1 in 10 could identify where to draw 2 point on a disk, and then rolling the disk would produce the sin and cos curves.
And thats 2d, those animations are fairly trivial, to understand evolution you need a fairly large conception of time, death and higher dementionality(because you are evolving in more then 3 traits at a time) thats beyond most adults frankly. Taking a bunch of 10 year olds and saying "now class repeat after me 'evolution real, god ded'" and then moving on to some movie with dinosaurs aint going to do it.
Ice cream! Thanks for this. I am somehow reminded of the scene in "Sleeper" where Woody Allen wakes up and learns that cigarettes are now considered good for you. I'm not sure but I think we had a 'all fat is bad' mindset for a time, and this lead us down many wrong paths.
It's been many years since I read him, but I believe Murray Rothbard did a pretty good job of dealing with the objection about unjust initial acquisition. Probably in The Ethics of Liberty.
Was that his "homesteading"? I remember being surprised at how simple he made it. I made a note saying that was in "Economics Controversies" -- "Justice and Property Rights".
It wasn't so simple, as I recollect. It had something to do with the traceability of claims. Actually, it seemed more pragmatic than Rothbard's usual formalistic principles approach. I no longer have a copy to check (remedying that with a new Kindle edition).
Of all the sciencey things to not believe, evolution and a young flat earth bother me very little. Those believers only hurt themselves, and only by precluding various fields of study. They make no difference to, say, carpenters, and there are (I think!) a lot more carpenters doing a lot more practical work than professors of biology, geology, and astronomy.
Also false beliefs about things that happened thousands of years ago are less of a problem than false beliefs about things one interacts with on a daily basis.
Nordhaus says that the effect of climate change is that by year 2100 instead of being 10 times richer we will be only 9.75 times richer. That's a bummer.
OTOH if we do something about climate change, by year 2100 instead of being10 times richer we will be maybe 2 times richer.
Such deja vu regarding that Usenet exchange with Objectivists.
I was off Usenet in 2000, but had essentially the same 'kill 'em all' debate 6 or 7 years later on SOLO - even with many of the faces the same (e.g. Beck, Greely, Weiss, Bennett). The libertarian mini-celeb who joined then was George H Smith.
It was eye opening that so many adherents to an individualist philosophy could make such a glaring collectivist error once it comes to foreign policy. (and also odd that even post-9/11, post-Afghan and Iraq invasions, so many were still fixated on Iran)
Anyway, I enjoyed reading your earlier but similarly frustrating discussion. It looks like you walked the fine line of level-headed arguments when possible, and sarcasm when nothing else was warranted.
On race and gender: everything you say is correct in my opinion, and therefore "equity" can only come from a diminishing of standards, which is both unfair and harmful to society.
Proponents of racial and gender quotas sow deliberate confusion by saying "If you oppose equity, you're saying that women and blacks can never be equal to white men." Not correct! There are lots of smart blacks and smart women, and Lord knows there are plenty of dumb white males. The overlap is more substantial than the differences, but differences in average (and extremes) do exist. Everyone should be judged as an individual, on merit, not on gender or skin color.
Regarding your debate with Gene, I wish I was there to continue questioning him.
In the flagpole example he says the victim (owner of the pole) can demand compensation, but according to subjective value which Gene subscribes to, what compensation is just is decided by the victim.
Now, imagine the court deciding on the case. The victim demands trillion dollars for the flagpole damage and the mental agony, after considering everything the court decides on a compensation of say $1000.
Was justice restored according to Gene?
If the answer is yes, then it begges the question of how this is different than eminent domain (in a community where eminent domain is generally acceptable).
If the answer is no, then we're back to NAP having unreasonable implications. Quite obviously a court could not follow that interpretation of NAP at least in this case.
I don't think the argument for the heritability of intelligence is valid. E.g. humans evolved to have two arms, but variation in the number of arms isn't heritable among humans.
I don't think that's a counterexample. We already know that intelligence varies widely along a spectrum; whereas, human anatomy is basically uniform across all humans. Lengths, sizes, and degrees can vary, but for something like number of appendages to vary, you'd need genes that code for that to not be heavily selected against at the outset. I kinda think of different breeds of dogs since they have different sizes, personalities, senses of smell, trainability, intelligence, etc. while also all having the same basic morphology.
The way I interpreted the article was that the argument was "X evolved -> X is heritable in population Y", which I think my example demonstrates is false. You appear to me to be making the different argument "X evolved & X varies in population Y -> X is heritable in population Y". I think that that argument is also false, and it's easy to imagine a scenario in which the genotype for X gets fixed but non-genetic variation in X remains. E.g. humans evolved the ability to speak, and now humans vary in the number of languages they speak, but this variation isn't very heritable.
Seems like a summary/ rehashing of many of your views. I appreciated the review, and you did a good job of avoiding saying anything quotable. I'm just not sure what the point is. You think intelligence is heritable and varies as genetic lineage varies. You aren't worried about climate change. People don't think things through.
Most importantly, in my opinion, you like ice cream, and i believe chocolate as well. I feel strongly about this topic, and you should know in advance that I will unsubscribe if you ever change your mind. I refuse to read authors who oppose ice cream.
So I'm going to go with my initial reaction to the title of your post, which was, "Who believes in science? Or religion?
And if you don't think I really believe, I'll link you to my latest and most coherent post about Bible Criticism. I'll hopefully have better ones in the future, but when I wrote the first one, I didn't even know the terms maximalism and minimalism, so ...
Thats actually a better evolutionary explanation of the differences in male/female intelligence variability than ive seen from any evolutionary thinkers, and its a particular interest of mine. The potential of having an extra high amount of offspring for men with very high intelligence makes a lot of sense. Would be very excited for you to write more about these sorts of evolutionary ideas, David. There’s a lot of economic thinking that goes into it, and evolutionary biologists and psychologists often lack that type of perspective.
The more I've read/listened to about libertarianism and economics, the more they seem intertwined with evolutionary mechanisms and spontaneous order. I understand why math and economics often "talk" to each other, but why does there not seem to be as thorough of a "conversation" going on between biology and econ. Heck, even physics (specifically statistical mechanics) could be related.
Am I just ignorant of this nexus, or do my perceptions hold some water? Do you know of any books or sources where I could learn more about this. I'll check out your old piece as well. Thanks!
My favorite example of the parallel logic is R.A. Fisher's explanation of why male and female offspring are born in equal numbers, and why in species with a lot of sexual dimorphism they aren't. It's basically the same as arguments about equilibrium prices. You can find the explanation in Chapter 1 of my price theory: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_1/PThy_CHAP_1.html. Search for "Economics and Evolution".
Hmmm. An acquaintance of mine, Muslim, bought a house near me. The house listed for $300K. A Muslim lending fund (you can find them pretty easily in the Detroit area) loaned him around $800,000 with no interest to be paid back in monthly installments over 30 years. Oddly enough, it worked out to be pretty much the same amount he would have paid monthly for a 4% 30-year mortgage for $300,000. Funny how that works out, huh.
I'm not sure I understand. Did he end up paying the interest in the form of a higher price on the house? Why couldn't he use $300,000 to buy the house and put the rest at interest?
I'm not sure why he didn't do that, but evidently he only got a check for $300,000 or so (closing costs and stuff -- he didn't give me an exact figure) and the rest was 'held' for him by the lending organization. All I really know is that he explained how Muslims can get "no interest" loans. There's a group called ACCESS in the Detroit area that 'finances' (or sends their clients to services that do the financing) lots of houses for Muslims, especially newly arrived ones. Many of my Muslim grad students use ACCESS for lots of things. It's a non-profit dedicated to helping Muslims. I'll link their webpage below.
Anyway, I'm not totally sure how it works, I just know that my students tell me they can get "no interest" loans for the same things they'd get loans for from a bank. My understanding, roughly, is that the 'lender' holds back a whole lot of money that they "pay back" whether they ever get to have possession of it or not.
Also, I think women can't participate. It's obviously a work around for the no usury thing.
I'll get in touch with a couple of my former students and see if they can tell me more.
Here is ACCESS. Dearborn probably has the largest Muslim community in any American city.
I expect its worse then politics inturpting the left from appling evoluton.
I think its closer to how schools ruin reading and math thru rote nonsense. I doubt 1 in 1000 ever had a concept of evolution in thier head. No different from teaching algerba as rules and rituals rather then, anything coherent and memorable.
I don't know about the US. But here in Germany in my school class I'm pretty sure about 18/24 people in my class understood Evolution.
Im not commenting on american religion or whatever, its mandated that evolution was in my science textbooks. Its a civilization wide problem that everyone overly focused on safety, holistic knowledge is down played, and teaching children by rote was invited by Germany for a simpler example how many people understand cos and sin, they may know by memorization the algebra they teach, but I bet 1 in 10 could identify where to draw 2 point on a disk, and then rolling the disk would produce the sin and cos curves.
And thats 2d, those animations are fairly trivial, to understand evolution you need a fairly large conception of time, death and higher dementionality(because you are evolving in more then 3 traits at a time) thats beyond most adults frankly. Taking a bunch of 10 year olds and saying "now class repeat after me 'evolution real, god ded'" and then moving on to some movie with dinosaurs aint going to do it.
Ice cream! Thanks for this. I am somehow reminded of the scene in "Sleeper" where Woody Allen wakes up and learns that cigarettes are now considered good for you. I'm not sure but I think we had a 'all fat is bad' mindset for a time, and this lead us down many wrong paths.
It's been many years since I read him, but I believe Murray Rothbard did a pretty good job of dealing with the objection about unjust initial acquisition. Probably in The Ethics of Liberty.
Was that his "homesteading"? I remember being surprised at how simple he made it. I made a note saying that was in "Economics Controversies" -- "Justice and Property Rights".
It wasn't so simple, as I recollect. It had something to do with the traceability of claims. Actually, it seemed more pragmatic than Rothbard's usual formalistic principles approach. I no longer have a copy to check (remedying that with a new Kindle edition).
Pecunia non olet. Fungibility applies to most asset classes.
Of all the sciencey things to not believe, evolution and a young flat earth bother me very little. Those believers only hurt themselves, and only by precluding various fields of study. They make no difference to, say, carpenters, and there are (I think!) a lot more carpenters doing a lot more practical work than professors of biology, geology, and astronomy.
Also false beliefs about things that happened thousands of years ago are less of a problem than false beliefs about things one interacts with on a daily basis.
Nordhaus says that the effect of climate change is that by year 2100 instead of being 10 times richer we will be only 9.75 times richer. That's a bummer.
OTOH if we do something about climate change, by year 2100 instead of being10 times richer we will be maybe 2 times richer.
What is Scott Alexander's formula for the forty-eight hour day?
Such deja vu regarding that Usenet exchange with Objectivists.
I was off Usenet in 2000, but had essentially the same 'kill 'em all' debate 6 or 7 years later on SOLO - even with many of the faces the same (e.g. Beck, Greely, Weiss, Bennett). The libertarian mini-celeb who joined then was George H Smith.
It was eye opening that so many adherents to an individualist philosophy could make such a glaring collectivist error once it comes to foreign policy. (and also odd that even post-9/11, post-Afghan and Iraq invasions, so many were still fixated on Iran)
Anyway, I enjoyed reading your earlier but similarly frustrating discussion. It looks like you walked the fine line of level-headed arguments when possible, and sarcasm when nothing else was warranted.
On race and gender: everything you say is correct in my opinion, and therefore "equity" can only come from a diminishing of standards, which is both unfair and harmful to society.
Proponents of racial and gender quotas sow deliberate confusion by saying "If you oppose equity, you're saying that women and blacks can never be equal to white men." Not correct! There are lots of smart blacks and smart women, and Lord knows there are plenty of dumb white males. The overlap is more substantial than the differences, but differences in average (and extremes) do exist. Everyone should be judged as an individual, on merit, not on gender or skin color.
Regarding your debate with Gene, I wish I was there to continue questioning him.
In the flagpole example he says the victim (owner of the pole) can demand compensation, but according to subjective value which Gene subscribes to, what compensation is just is decided by the victim.
Now, imagine the court deciding on the case. The victim demands trillion dollars for the flagpole damage and the mental agony, after considering everything the court decides on a compensation of say $1000.
Was justice restored according to Gene?
If the answer is yes, then it begges the question of how this is different than eminent domain (in a community where eminent domain is generally acceptable).
If the answer is no, then we're back to NAP having unreasonable implications. Quite obviously a court could not follow that interpretation of NAP at least in this case.
I don't think the argument for the heritability of intelligence is valid. E.g. humans evolved to have two arms, but variation in the number of arms isn't heritable among humans.
I don't think that's a counterexample. We already know that intelligence varies widely along a spectrum; whereas, human anatomy is basically uniform across all humans. Lengths, sizes, and degrees can vary, but for something like number of appendages to vary, you'd need genes that code for that to not be heavily selected against at the outset. I kinda think of different breeds of dogs since they have different sizes, personalities, senses of smell, trainability, intelligence, etc. while also all having the same basic morphology.
The way I interpreted the article was that the argument was "X evolved -> X is heritable in population Y", which I think my example demonstrates is false. You appear to me to be making the different argument "X evolved & X varies in population Y -> X is heritable in population Y". I think that that argument is also false, and it's easy to imagine a scenario in which the genotype for X gets fixed but non-genetic variation in X remains. E.g. humans evolved the ability to speak, and now humans vary in the number of languages they speak, but this variation isn't very heritable.
It seems to be quite an odd system, but of long standing.
Thank you for putting my ice cream link out there. I wasn't sure if you saw it.
Your newsletter is one of the few places that make me think, and then rethink my beliefs.
Seems like a summary/ rehashing of many of your views. I appreciated the review, and you did a good job of avoiding saying anything quotable. I'm just not sure what the point is. You think intelligence is heritable and varies as genetic lineage varies. You aren't worried about climate change. People don't think things through.
Most importantly, in my opinion, you like ice cream, and i believe chocolate as well. I feel strongly about this topic, and you should know in advance that I will unsubscribe if you ever change your mind. I refuse to read authors who oppose ice cream.
So I'm going to go with my initial reaction to the title of your post, which was, "Who believes in science? Or religion?
Thanks to the Or, I qualify!
And if you don't think I really believe, I'll link you to my latest and most coherent post about Bible Criticism. I'll hopefully have better ones in the future, but when I wrote the first one, I didn't even know the terms maximalism and minimalism, so ...
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/boris-the-terrible-dreams-about-shavuot?sd=pf
Thats actually a better evolutionary explanation of the differences in male/female intelligence variability than ive seen from any evolutionary thinkers, and its a particular interest of mine. The potential of having an extra high amount of offspring for men with very high intelligence makes a lot of sense. Would be very excited for you to write more about these sorts of evolutionary ideas, David. There’s a lot of economic thinking that goes into it, and evolutionary biologists and psychologists often lack that type of perspective.
I have an old piece on economics and evolutionary psychology.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/economics_and_evol_psych.html
The more I've read/listened to about libertarianism and economics, the more they seem intertwined with evolutionary mechanisms and spontaneous order. I understand why math and economics often "talk" to each other, but why does there not seem to be as thorough of a "conversation" going on between biology and econ. Heck, even physics (specifically statistical mechanics) could be related.
Am I just ignorant of this nexus, or do my perceptions hold some water? Do you know of any books or sources where I could learn more about this. I'll check out your old piece as well. Thanks!
My favorite example of the parallel logic is R.A. Fisher's explanation of why male and female offspring are born in equal numbers, and why in species with a lot of sexual dimorphism they aren't. It's basically the same as arguments about equilibrium prices. You can find the explanation in Chapter 1 of my price theory: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_1/PThy_CHAP_1.html. Search for "Economics and Evolution".
Hmmm. An acquaintance of mine, Muslim, bought a house near me. The house listed for $300K. A Muslim lending fund (you can find them pretty easily in the Detroit area) loaned him around $800,000 with no interest to be paid back in monthly installments over 30 years. Oddly enough, it worked out to be pretty much the same amount he would have paid monthly for a 4% 30-year mortgage for $300,000. Funny how that works out, huh.
I'm not sure I understand. Did he end up paying the interest in the form of a higher price on the house? Why couldn't he use $300,000 to buy the house and put the rest at interest?
I'm not sure why he didn't do that, but evidently he only got a check for $300,000 or so (closing costs and stuff -- he didn't give me an exact figure) and the rest was 'held' for him by the lending organization. All I really know is that he explained how Muslims can get "no interest" loans. There's a group called ACCESS in the Detroit area that 'finances' (or sends their clients to services that do the financing) lots of houses for Muslims, especially newly arrived ones. Many of my Muslim grad students use ACCESS for lots of things. It's a non-profit dedicated to helping Muslims. I'll link their webpage below.
Anyway, I'm not totally sure how it works, I just know that my students tell me they can get "no interest" loans for the same things they'd get loans for from a bank. My understanding, roughly, is that the 'lender' holds back a whole lot of money that they "pay back" whether they ever get to have possession of it or not.
Also, I think women can't participate. It's obviously a work around for the no usury thing.
I'll get in touch with a couple of my former students and see if they can tell me more.
Here is ACCESS. Dearborn probably has the largest Muslim community in any American city.
https://www.accesscommunity.org/
Ah. Probably one of these.
https://www.comparethemarket.com/mortgages/content/islamic-mortgages/
Thanks. That's clear. I have added a reference and link to my post.
Regarding the difference in people based on XX or XY:
https://www.mattball.org/2019/01/equality.html