You might suggest sleep, but others are often jealous of how much sleep we get, or impressed by how little sleep we can get by on.

In that case, parallel reasoning eliminates anything taboo. We signal our acceptance of community norms by avoiding taboo subjects. We might tell stories to make it less obvious that conformity is an end in itself: "intelligent people resist the temptation to swear and find more effective ways to express themselves," cf. George Carlin and his seven words.

Fight of flight responses seem like a pretty clear case. Until the 20th century, most military engagements were won by putting the enemy's troops to rout and then destroying the fleeing army in detail. That suggests many find it preferable to risk total disgrace, and possible death later, to be able to run away from an immediately dangerous situation. (cf. The Red Badge of Courage, Spartan women saying "come back with your shield or on it.") Other extremely intense situations, like a parent protecting the life of a child, would probably work the same way.

We're told it's a bad idea to go into business with friends because we tend to overestimate the likelihood that they will remain loyal to us. Also, we're sometimes willing to put up with the opprobrium of friends or relatives for a potential mate. Obviously signaling is extremely important in business and mating, but we will ignore it if the price is right.

Actions taken under the influence of drugs or alcohol might count, although there's a wide range of behaviors to sort through. In college I knew a lot of people who drank heavily and publicly so that they could be (or feel, or feel perceived to be) signal-free for a while. There's also the narrative that East Asian societies are socially repressive but don't hold individuals responsible for their behavior while drunk, so binge drinking in groups is a common way to relieve stress. I have no idea whether it's true, but it's obviously a story about signaling. On the other hand, a guy on an acid trip, having a conversation with inanimate objects, isn't signaling anybody.

Signaling is, generally speaking, a means of displaying social status and desirability as a mate, yes?

Ergo, anything that directly fulfills a basic physical imperative other than the reproductive drive is a likely candidate for non-signaling. Hunger, exhaustion, the fight or flight reaction, &c. Of course, all of these can be wrapped in contexts indicating social status, but the actions themselves are likely mostly neutral. e.g., people may brag about their sleep habits for status, but when they do go to bed it's probably because they're tired, not because they're thinking about how it will impress others. It's the talking about sleeping that is doing the signaling here.

If you're interested in reading some reasonable libertarians, you might try The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, or EconLog as starting points.

FWIW, I generally find Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen more reasonable than those listed above. (Yes, I realize Will works for the Cato Institute; I find him more reasonable than his employers.) YMMV.

Some people dream of great things. Others stay awake and do them.

-Poster found in school classrooms

(Anyone know the original source?)

It's not about whether it's okay, it's about whether it's "part of who he is" or an alien intrusion.

Thanks for linking me to a Tim Minchin song I hadn't heard before =)

Taken together, bullet points 2, 3, and 4 are a textbook strawman.

That's certainly not what I meant by "poisoning the discourse," or I would have made my comment on it. It isn't a strawman (in the sense of purely made up). That is how most libertarians argue. I liked that post much better, but it still doesn't say why these actions by the majority of libertarians matter. Maybe they've poisoned the word already. Saying "these guys are nuts, avoid their brand name" is just pointing out a bad situation, not making it worse. There are other reasons it might matter: a consequentialist libertarian should ask himself how he reached that state, if it was from fakely consequentialist libertarian arguments.

It reminds me of Robin Hanson's advice to pull the rope sideways; while that seems like good advice on how to choose policies to focus on, his advice not to choose sides seems exactly backwards. Instead, choose a party, prove your loyalty, and pull that party sideways.

I am not afraid of fakely consequentialist libertarians, because I think I can tell the difference. Except that I am afraid of Cato, which argues from the conclusions and might be cluefull enough to invest in rhetoric. Why would you ever look to lobbyists?

One interesting claim [of policy libertarianism]: State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well."

My main complaint with this argument is that it should be empirically testable. You can implement regulatory scheme X in Area A, and no regulatory scheme in Area B, and see which produces better results. For example, ban all cancer treatments that top doctors agree are useless and dangerous in Area A, keep all treatments legal in Area B, and see which area has higher mortality among cancer patients.

Many libertarians I know have absolutely no interest in doing this, and don't even like talking about the term "regulatory scheme X" because they prefer to lump all possible regulatory schemes together and judge them on the merit of the first one that comes to mind (this is also a problem with many socialists, for the opposite reason).

I don't know much about economics, but I do know a bit about public health policy, and the people in charge of that are sometimes very good about using studies to determine whether their government interventions are an overall improvement over the no-intervention case (obvious exception: the FDA, which is very good at running studies, but very bad at running the right studies and doing sane cost-benefit analysis). When these studies show positive results at relatively low cost, a truly consequentialist libertarian ought to admit government regulation has been effective in that case. Instead, they tend to dismiss it as a fluke or start talking about some case where government regulation isn't effective.

I think the great error in this whole debate is framing it as a conflict between socialists (who supposedly ought to think all government interventions are great) and libertarians (who supposedly ought to think all government interventions are terrible). In reality, some of these will work and some of these won't. I'd rather people started paying more attention to which were which than become crusaders for bigger or smaller government. I think "Government regulation is bad" (or "is good") is approximately the same kind of sentence as "Islam is a religion of peace".

Taken together, bullet points 2, 3, and 4 are a textbook strawman.

Uhm, point 2 at least is a straight up fact, as real markets typically diverge to varying degrees from perfect markets. I also note you don't actually dispute point 1, which is the strong statement of a deontological ethical position, and pure deontology remains incompatible with consequentialism, hence the apparent contradiction in ethical systems.

To me, this speaks more to the extent of your motivation to find merit-worthy libertarian writing than to the merit of libertarian ideas.

If I've been unimpressed with the arguments of rank-and-file members of a political position, why would I be motivated to look for better writing that may or may not exist? Do you go looking for merit-worthy religious apologetics?

That said, do you know of any libertarian arguments that do not assume either 1) economic freedom as the primary terminal value or 2) assume the efficiency of real-world markets? Both are unwarranted assumptions that seem to underlie many libertarian arguments I've seen.

Really? Respectfully, it seems much more plausible, based on the tone of your post, that you're couching an appeal for your own preferred policy in hypothetical terms than that you're actually suffering from a failure of imagination.

Well, yes, I prefer policies that are empirically demonstrated to actually work, especially when the cost of trying a system that fails is very high. Why don't you?

Videos like this one partake of the typical mind fallacy.

"I understand the world through rational explanations," the rationalist auteur tells himself, "so I'll produce a rational explanation of the value of rational explanation for people who irrationally value irrational explanations." Hasn't this been tried enough for us to conclude that it doesn't win?

Instead, it seems to me that the only sane way to proceed is by adopting strategies that co-opt -- or at least demonstrate some awareness of -- believers' reasons for believing.

For example, consider the subtext of Tim Minchin's secular Christmas song, White Wine in the Sun, in light of what we know about the signaling role of religious belief. It says^Wsignals:

• atheists have emotions
• they have families
• they love their children
• they're good people
• they like music
• in fact, they like all the same things about holidays that you do.
• they also have some trenchant observations about the increasingly anachronistic rituals and institutions that we are supposed to accept are part and parcel of sincere belief...
• and maybe you should too