I don't usually submit articles to Discussion, but this news upset me so much that I think there is a real need to talk about it. http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer-reviews-prompt-64-retractions-1.18202 > A leading scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals, after an internal investigation discovered fabricated peer-review reports linked to the...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
There is a new paper out by Sanguinetti, Allen, and Peterson, The Ground Side of an Object: Perceived as Shapeless yet Processed for Semantics. In it, the authors conduct a series of experiments to try to answer the question of how the brain separates background from foreground in visual processing....
Anyone can easily deny that they are biased. That takes no effort. So, again, why is it a 'godawful clickbait piece-of-crap'?
On the contrary, being able to identify your own biases and being able to express what kind of information would change your mind is at the heart of rationality.
You're a libertarian. We all know that. But regardless of whether you ideologically agree with the conclusions of the article or not, you should be able to give a more convincing counter-argument than 'godawful clickbait piece-of-crap.'
What you're saying doesn't sound to me like a disagreement that there must be some higher authority. It just sounds like you're saying that the final authority gets decided at run-time, based on whoever happens to have the most financial power. So then the question becomes: Why do you think this is preferable to a system where authority is agreed upon beforehand by a majority of the people?
And just to make the discussion clearer, let's make it even more specific and talk about the issue of disputes over ownership of objects or property.
The comparison to religion makes no sense. Unlike biological organisms, human governments are designed. For example, in the case of the US, the structure and function of the court system is very explicitly laid out in the US constitution, and it was carefully designed in a committee via months/years of debate.
In each possible situation, it's useful to have an authority available who has final say over disputes. But it's not necessarily for every process in society to depend on the same authority.
Then who gets to decide who that authority is for every particular situation?
Can you be more specific?
I don't know what "an unusually high preference for liberty/freedom" means. Every single political philosophy claims that it is pro-freedom. Even totalitarian regimes claim to be pro-freedom. Without reference to specific policy positions, claiming to be 'pro-freedom' seems meaningless to me.
So that reduces your definition of libertarianism to 'far-off-the-center position on the individualism vs collectivism axis'.
For a stable society to exist, at some level everyone has to agree upon some central authority with final say over disputes and superlative enforcement ability. Do you agree with this or not?
I've tried before to steelman it and failed because the arguments constantly shift around and are hard to pin down. Tailoring arguments to every single person's interpretation gets tiring after a while. But if you can provide an explanation or link to what you believe then I'd read and try to steelman it to see if I understand your position correctly.
Here, though, I'm arguing on a more meta level - even assuming that it comprised a coherent set of beliefs, and assuming you had a well-defined utility function you wanted to maximize, how would you possibly go about providing a truly rational justification that libertarianism applied to a large mass of complicated human beings would result in the desired outcome? This also applies to capitalism, socialism, communism, etc. Essentially anything other than pure utilitarianism, but even utilitarianism requires a lot of fleshing out before you get to anything resembling a working procedure for governing people.
What surprises me is that you would even ask that question... what rational justification is there for libertarianism?
Neoreaction, libertarianism, and related ideologies.
I don't usually submit articles to Discussion, but this news upset me so much that I think there is a real need to talk about it.
http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer-reviews-prompt-64-retractions-1.18202
A leading scientific publisher has retracted 64 articles in 10 journals, after an internal investigation discovered fabricated peer-review reports linked to the articles’ publication.
The cull comes after similar discoveries of ‘fake peer review’ by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing "reviews from fabricated reviewers". The practice can occur when researchers submitting a paper for publication suggest reviewers, but supply contact details for them that actually route requests for review back to the researchers themselves.
We all know... (read 1068 more words →)
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
There is a new paper out by Sanguinetti, Allen, and Peterson, The Ground Side of an Object: Perceived as Shapeless yet Processed for Semantics. In it, the authors conduct a series of experiments to try to answer the question of how the brain separates background from foreground in visual processing. I found it interesting, so I thought I'd share. The human visual system is incredibly complex and we still have no clear idea how it does a lot of the things it does.
The experimental protocol was as follows:
... (read 682 more words →)The stimuli were 120 small, mirror-symmetric, enclosed white silhouettes (Trujillo, Allen, Schnyer, & Peterson, 2010). Of these, 40 portrayed meaningful name-able objects (animals, plants, symbols)
And Lumifer's dismissal of it is probably the most low-effort way of responding. Students of rationality, take note.