Ten Thousand Days Alive!

Today is my ten thousandth day alive. I’d like to thank my parents for making this day possible.

Our culture doesn’t celebrate this day but I wanted to start – after all, celebrating birthdays is equally arbitrary. I think this will be a very lucky day, and I wish you all the best!

Michael “Myriad” Currie

100 Pushups

I want to be able to do 100 pushups continuously. So I’ve been doing sets of 100 pushups, taking breaks if I need to, but trying to get to 100 as quickly as possible. If I keep doing this eventually I will be doing them so fast it will be continuous. According to the data so far, and assuming my progress is somewhat linear, I can achieve my goal by mid-December:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8190939.stm

Icelanders made to pay Versailles-level reparations by British government

An example of how gov’t intervention made our lives worse:

1. The British government passes terrorist legislation to freeze terrorist accounts:

2. Icelanders get their assets frozen abroad because of the actions of a private bank in iceland (it made lots of bad loans).

3. So to appease the british government the icelandic government has to promise to pay bank british depositors to the icelandic bank (why would the government post hoc guarantee an insolvent bank??)

4. This way the icelandic government hopes to get british government aid and their accounts unfrozen!

What started the problem here?  The chancellor of the exchequer was ever given the power to freeze innocent people’s accounts to begin with, through the terrorist legislation.

This is pretty sad:

Dutch bid to thwart young sailor

The original BBC article is here.

The basic principle of liberty is to allow others to do what they want provided it does no harm to others.  Under this principle, ignoring her age, we should let her do it.

Why would we not let her?  Because we think she’s not capable of thinking through her decisions yet, and so her decisions should not be respected.  Normally it would be enough to simply let the parent delimit a child’s decisions using their guidance.

In this case, however, the parents are supposedly not properly delimiting the decisions of the child.  So someone else must step in.  I think the case for overruling parents’ authority over their children is valid in principle – imagine a parent who has convinced their child to kill themselves “voluntarily”, or some other sufficiently odious behaviour.

So where and how do we draw the line?  Let’s consider the general case of a child who “wants” to do a dangerous activity (that would cause no harm to others).  The parents support the child.  Should the state intervene?

We need to consider:

1. The state of development of the child (a 6-year-old’s decisions should be respected less than a 13-year-old’s.)

2. The extent to which the parents are influencing the decisions of the child (if the parent is very manipulative or if they are letting the child make their own decisions)

3. The danger to the child (crossing the street alone vs. playing in a volcano alone)

We would have to bring these three variables together and decide subjectively if we think it crosses the line.  In the sailing case I have the first two variables well measured but I don’t fully understand the magnitude of the third.  Perhaps there is a way to mitigate the danger?  With GPS or with the parents following closely behind?

My final judgement is that if it’s not too dangerous, the state should not intervene.

Part 3 and 4

Part 3 – Is private property legitimate?

Teemu argues against private property in two ways:

• First he argues that if someone simply inherits property that’s not fair.
  • But it was a voluntary transaction, and
  • Someone “unfairly” having property he didn’t earn doesn’t harm anyone else
• Second he argues many people have property not from non-coercive success at business but from inheriting it long ago when people did acquire the land unfairly
  • I argue this is patently not true for the vast majority of land, at least in Canada.

I do concede that many libertarians treat private property as the end, not the means to an end.  I don’t elaborate far enough to think of examples of this, however.

Part 4 – An attack on the concept of the “self-made man” and its implications to Libertarianism

Teemu describes examples from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers to support his argument that the self-made man is a myth, and in fact everyone is the product of favourable circumstances or genetics.  Therefore we can’t sit back and not care that the poor remain poor, comforted by the view that they are simply lazy and didn’t try hard enough.

I argue that of course if you drill down deeply enough, you will be able to identify the physical causes of why one person succeeded while another didn’t.  That doesn’t mean we can’t draw the line at some point and declare that what lies past the line constitutes what we mean by a person’s “free will”.

In my view, our thinking on this subject should progress in stages:

Stage 1: A belief in “hard meritocracy” (Teemu’s phrase), where we don’t care if people are poor or not, because if they are they must not have tried hard enough.

Stage 2: An Outliers-influenced belief that no one is responsible for their circumstances, and therefore we must intervene to help all those with poor initial circumstances

Stage 3: We draw a line where we define “free will”, and help people up to this line (perhaps through charity).  Past it, we accept that people can be lazy if they want to!

To attempt to “assist” people out of their desire to drink beer, watch wrestling on TV, and other things you define as bad thoughts and desires is to destroy our humanity.  What makes us human is all our imperfections, I think.

Pay us or the rainforest gets it

Part 2 – Dogmatism vs. Ideology as it relates to Libertarians

• Teemu also pointed out that too many people stop thinking after they’ve read one book or two and then base all their thoughts on that.  It would be as if he and I had read Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action back in 2002 and then blogged about everything in the world we think that is inconsistent with it for the next 10 years.
  • I agreed with him up to a point but I tried to make a distinction between dogmatism and ideology.  It is possible to have strongly held beliefs that certain things are true, as long as those beliefs are backed up by evidence and you are in principle able to change those views.  To argue that you must always maintain a neutral agnosticism about everything out of fear of becoming ideological is more than unnecessary – you would sacrifice the concept of truth at the altar of agnosticism.
  • Just like the economists I referenced in part 1, as long as you maintain a methodological openness, you can be as ideological as you want without being dogmatic.
  • I also remarked that it is better to be certain of your ideas one by one rather than accept a whole overarching philosophy like Libertarianism at once, accepting even the more untested bits along with the clearly true parts.
    • Then we got on a bit of a tangent about how the only way for society to become libertarian is through a grassroots change in people’s attitudes towards helping themselves and each other – Teemu paraphrased the quote “Have a revolution only once you could win an election”
      • I pointed out how libertarianism can indeed arise from populist, grassroots sentiments – look at the reaction to the bailouts and stimulus packages in the US.  It’s simply the political incentive structure that prevents this populist sentiment from manifesting in real political action.

At this point our discusson changed to Teemu trying to raise some issues with Libertarianism I had never heard him raise before.  It would appear in the past few months, perhaps influenced by his reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, his previously radical libertarianism has moderated significantly.  This will be discussed in Parts 3 and 4.

I had a 2.5-hour conversation on 10 August 2009 with my friend, Teemu Pihlajamäki.  We hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks and therefore had many thoughts that were ready to harvest.

Part 1 – Blogs

• He asked me why I wanted to start a blog.  I’ve had several abortive attempts to start blogs in the past, but they all failed, because I was too ambitious – I wanted to express my complete, finished, perfect worldview on all subjects.  I now realize that I can contribute to the world of ideas without having decided everything.  I can be comfortable with a high level of agnosticism on many subjects, while still sharing some small perspectives or insights on issues, and not having them simply die in my head or in my notes.  I can put them out there to participate in the world of ideas.  I want to be a branch, not just a leaf in the tree of knowledge.
• Teemu worried that by publishing anything you get identified with a set of views, which makes it difficult to take your views back in the face of contradicting evidence.  Publishing, therefore, is dangerous because it crystallizes your ideas and arrests your intellectual development.
  • For example, even if he encountered good evidence contradicting climate change Al Gore would have a hard time taking back what he’s said, changing his views, without losing all credibility.
  • I pointed out this occurs more often with public figures, whereas academics can change their minds about things more easily – take the example in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion of an old British professor who passionately believed one thing and then when presented with contradictory evidence in a lecture by an American, he came up and said “I’ve been wrong these 15 years”, and everyone in the lecture hall applauded.
  • I also pointed out a recent economist article alleging that it’s more acceptable to flip-flop on issues of public policy if you’re an economist:
    • “Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form. They are more wedded to their techniques than to their theories.”
  • Outside of academia, however, we both agreed that it helps to be declarative and certain if you want to be heard, as The Onion once lampooned.
  • Recently Teemu has been reading about the input hypothesis of language learning, which is also called “Automatic Language Growth” by followers of J. Marvin Brown (the subject of a future blog post to be sure).
    • I remarked that Teemu’s comments amounted to a generalization of the “input hypothesis” to ideas.
    • It’s disanalogous in many ways though, since languages just “pop” (Brown’s term) while understanding ideas requires real critical thinking and output can help that: e.g. writing term papers, or debating.