Baldur's Gate II Playthrough Notes, Part 1

Here are my notes playing BG2EE. I tried to play well after having BG1EE experience. This goes maybe half way through Shadows of Amn, I'm not really sure how far I am exactly. I'm now on a long break, and also started playing Pillars of Eternity, so I'm posting this without finishing the game.

Maybe you can learn something about attention to detail, and the effort involved in doing things well. Philosophy/thinking/reason is a lot harder than this game. If you aren't trying a hell of a lot harder at life than I try when merely playing Baldur's Gate 2, you're doing it wrong.

made new CN HU cleric, edited stats for bg1 93+tomes and edited dreams (2 CLW, 2 Horror, 2 Holy Might). plan to dual mage at 11, and do all the early game things to get xp for that and to see them.

goal: core rules (max hp main char only), minimal reloads, minimal resurrection (including stone to flesh), minimal rests in unreasonable places. reloads allowed for testing a few minor things, like where a companion goes if i dismiss him.

blind play through, avoiding google: played ~20%(?) of the game years ago forget tons, practiced through intro to Coronet once, read companions guide and some character build info. After playing through some quests I remembered what I did before better (not in order): Irenicus dungeon, Circus Tent, Eyeless Cult, Planar Sphere, De'Arnise, Windspear, Umar. That's about it, and I didn't really remember useful details beyond the intro dungeon. I don't even remember what companions I used before or what class I was. I played bg1ee a lot, getting a lot more help from that knowledge.

plan to swap companions and do a lot of quests, take my time and be careful. good/neutral party mainly. also for a first playthrough I don't wanna use ToB stuff until I do SoA. I did go to watcher's keep to buy a potion case, but that's it, I didn't even read the rest of what's for sale there, not going to use it until later.

Grey areas: Allow sell and rebuy items to recharge. Allow using simulacrum and project image quick slots (e.g. let's you use scrolls without consuming them). Allow erasing spells from spellbook to relearn for xp (my own invention!). Undecided: making copies of copies with simulacrum and project image. My guess is allowed, but I'm not actually sure how the mechanics on that work, I'll test when I'm high level.

NOT ALLOWED to use pickpocket to dupe items that are given as a quest reward after. NOT ALLOWED to do anything I consider a clear bug, like the Force Talk stuff, or using summons + polymorph to push through a wall.

Allowed to erase and re-scribe scrolls, allowed to remove party members while scribing or otherwise to manipulate XP.

logging reloads and resurrections/stone2flesh, outdoors rests, and major events:

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1 rest in starting room to set spells for me/imoen/jaheira

Made way slowly through Irenicus dungeon. Triggered a lightning trap; lost heals. Minsc got diseased but I had a Neutral Poison memorized to remove it. Ate all 15 Goodberries. Imoen fireballed the Duregar very effectively. Ran into two traps rushing the dogs to the next room, ran out of heals. Level 8 from Genie quest. Haste spell and Seeking Sword beat Mephit summoning room. Drank most of the regular healing potions.

Slew Kalah, went to Coronet. +Aerie +Nalia +Korgan +Anomen, -Jaheira -Yoshimo. 175k xp

de'Arnise keep (2 rests): Made my way upstairs. Rested in closed room after killing Yuan-Ti mage. Dispelled the charm on Glaicus. Minsc died in the dungeon to umberhulks, got charmed. I need to be more careful with pathing and get Chaotic Commands when a cleric hits level 9. Fighting the troll boss, drank a lot of heal pots and kited and beat him, and then fire arrows didn't finish him off and he got back up at full hp and killed aerie, and then the game crashed and my last save was at start of the cellar, free reload lol. Cleared the umberhulks better and cleared outside. Stole from treasure room, did the stone golems in a choke point, iron golem stuck in the room, resists everything, too scary to melee. Rested in closed bedroom again and fought troll boss, this time sent some skeletons ahead then webbed him, then layered on slow and cloudkill, won fight without getting hitdid not take damage. 45.5k quest xp. Up to 252k xp, and 26k gold after selling.

Korgan Tomb: -Nalia, +Hexxat. Got ID glasses, +2 large shield, platemail. Cleared top of graveyard daytime. Rested at 267.5k xp and 18k gold. Entered graveyard lower tombs. Did spiders and southern Korgan area. Was very careful with disarming traps, Hexxat went in front up to 285k xp. Went up, declined Bohdi's offer, rested, Anonem's sister died.

Dragomir's Tomb (1 death): Got real Hexxat. But i used Minsc berserk b/c of dire charm from dragomir, and used all my dispels on the first dire charm on Clara. then Anomen got charmed and after I won the fight Minsc attacked Anomen and I couldn't get them to stop fighting. Was out of healing spells, couldn't potion him because of charm. I used Web and Slow then two Hold Person on Minsc but he still killed Anomen who I resurrected at a temple after. Minsc in Berserk + anyone charmed = really bad news. In hindsight, forgot to get Dispel Magic scroll out of scroll case, maybe could have saved him. 297k xp

Killed Korgan's old allies. Started Anomen sister quest. Got the unseeing eye cult quest, acting troupe haer'dalis quest, hunt valygar quest, and rescue montaron quest. 305k xp, 26k gold

Sewers (1 death): -Hexxat +Jan. Got quest to infiltrate shadow thieves lieutenant, got some valygar evidence. Went sewers, walked into adventurers and Minsc got 1 shot from full hp by Finger of Death. Doh... I think I need to keep summons/buffs up more when walking around, and use invisibility to scout ahead more. Resurrected Minsc.

Haer'Dalis Rescue (2 deaths): -Korgan, +Keldorn. Found Haer'Dalis area from sewers. The mage cast Death Spell which killed Keldorn and Jan with no save. Resurrected Keldorn and Jan (rested and cast Raise Dead myself).

+Haer'Dalis, -Keldorn. Did Haer'Dalis gem summoning fight then they all disappeared. Went to Delosar's Inn, Jan died to Death Spell or something, then it crashed, last save leaving the Haer'Dalis Inn. +Keldorn

Umar Hills: Friends with Madulf, +Valygar -Minsc, did quests, cleared temple ruins initial map. Went back to town to donate at temple to 17rep and set up better spells on Aerie, bought Robe of Vecna. Rested at Umar Hills Inn, then went back to the temple ruins

Temple Ruins Dungeon: +Mazzy, -Anomen. Prayer rituals:

Morning: ??, hold tome to sun for power, reflect victory light over drak
noon: voice songs for Lord, ??, Rejoice glory of light over dark
Dusk: Recite tenets of faith, hold children high to sun > night, ??

Took some damage due to confusion about question wording, even though I figured out how each prayer works. Rested back at Umar Hills before continuing deeper. Prebuffing and Melf's Minute Meteors beat the boss easily. 450k xp, sold back to 26k gold. Mazzy fought and ogre and fought some vamps in the street. Really need to get a magic permit.

Planar Sphere: mage with spell trigger put up a ton of defenses including protection from magical weapons and protection from normal missiles. i gave everyone magic ammo and shot at the mage, but ineffective. ran but stun symbol got 4 people. thought maybe keldorn/mazzy/valygar would wipe to death spell. summoned monsters to distract, cast web, remove magic, haste, chant. then removed paralysis and run away. they wasted a lot of spells on summons, and did a high level dispel on jan. disintegrate, domination, confusion etc were cast on the summons. invis scout and lured the fighter away with a summon, got str gloves. sent in more summons and the casters got low on spells, down to acid arrow and magic missiles, finished them off safely. Looted and rested in the safe room. bg2 crashed after i lured away and killed the fighter and was about to finish the fight, fortunately i saved before luring him.

Planar Sphere (3 deaths): Did Sahaguin, adventurer group and some fire elementals safely. Then Jan got 1 shot by a trap. Rested once, raised him and cast heals. In retrospect, should have used Rod of Ressurection to avoid that heal. Not the left rune (misclicked on it, almost killed Jan again). Prebuffed a TON for Lavok, but all that really mattered were minute meteors which carried the fight. Pushed too hard clearing the outside with a hurt party without resting, Aerie died on the last demon, used Rod on her. Then rested. Didn't figure out the rune puzzle but buffed to 125 fire resist and brute forced. Order: Top, Bottom, Right, Left. For Tolgarias fight, got scared and ran downstairs, put up 20 buffs while letting his Improved Mantle expire, went back up and wasn't in vision range so i cast some summons, one of which ate a Death Symbol. Then game crashed and I had to redo the fight, but won again no problem, Minute Meteors OP. Beat the stone golems in the engine room (ugh, don't only have 2 weapons that hit them), but Jan got 1shot by a fireball vs the efreeti when finishing off the last room I'd passed by. 577k xp, 45k gp

Bridge District (1 petrify trap death): -valygar, got 5k magic permit. Keldorn's wife cheating. Rescued Viconia with curi/Mazzy/Aerie/Jan, told her maybe she could join later, rep still 18. Got Keldorn back. Fought Captain Dennis at Delosar's Inn. Tough fight, ran outside, sent summons at them, really could have used a Breach spell. A globe of invulnerability was blocking my minute meteors. Then Mazzy got petrified opening a door. I turned her back to flesh but she was bugged and wouldn't rejoin party even if i travelled to slums and back, so I reloaded to deal with the bug (she wasn't mad at me, it just wouldn't bring up a chat). Searching bridge district houses, found a little loot and an Ankheg Shell. Helped the fallen paladins fight some smugglers. bought str belt, air control ring, ac3 bracers, simulacrum helm. 13k gold left

Total Status: 0 reload, 8 deaths (1 finger of death, 2 death spell, 2 trap, 2 combat, 1 charm)

Windspear Hills (1 rest, 1 trap death): Pretty easy outside and first dungeon level. The big undead fight drained Keldorn to level 1. Used a scroll to restore him. Anomen got drained 2 levels a little later. Charmed the air elemental from the well but it wouldn't fit through doors to go tank something for me, ended up fighting it. Wasn't fooled by the werewolf dialog. Adamantite Golem (25k xp) was very scary but couldn't fit through the door. Only my +3 flail of ages and +1 warhammer (+4 vs giant humanoids) seem to hit it. Mace +1, magic and ranged weapons don't work. I made a Simulacrum with the helm, used a lesser restoration scroll, a rod of ressurection charge to heal someone, 3 minute meteor scrolls, and around 8 charges from my staff of fire to summon fire elementals before it ran out of duration. this got the adamantite golem to injured status. wasn't the most efficient use of send fire elementals a few at a time. i should have made an army of them and then fought all at once. after that i really wanted to kill it. so i summoned stuff, chanted, went for it. had like no heals left though. when keldorn got hurt i ran him out of the room and gave the warhammer to anomen, who got hurt and gave it to mazzy. the golem did a 72 damage crit to the first fire elemental i summoned so i knew at full hp with helmets my people were basically safe to take one hit and run. barely finished it off. used a few heal pots too. learned Breach on Jan because he never was using his level 5 spells, so now at least Aerie can memorize useful summons on level 5 and Jan will just sit on 2 Breaches. keep trying to optimize my spells. i feel like i could go back and safely kill the de'arnise iron golem now. i have refused to google info on what else can kill them. oh melf's minute meteors hits them for the missile damage but not the fire damage i think, it does work a little bit. tried to push on but Jan triggered the cloudkill trap, oops my bad. I tend to have him way in front so it was fine, but with most of my party hurt and no heal spells, Iclosed the door in werewolf rooms and rested, with most of dungeon level 2 clear (all but tomb and Tazok room). 648k xp, plan was hopefully to finish this area right after leveling so i can go home and dual class to mage at 675k xp (level 11 cleric).

Found Minor Sequencer in Tazok room. Used Web to make the room easy. Have been using a lot of web. At Firkraag, I saved and tried attacking him once for fun. I set made an army of 10 fire elementals with Simulacrum + Staff of Fire. And I used 2 Protection from Magic scrolls with the Simulacrum. Didn't matter, did like nothing to him, lol. Slew a beholder!! Jan died in one hit to a false door trap, even though I expected it'd be a false one ... apparently I need to wait longer to detect traps. Used Rod of Ressurections on Jan. I need a high charge Rod for Simulacrum, but there is one at the adventurer mart, or I can sell and rebuy it when it's low.

After doing the Tomb, the adventurers ambushed me in a way too narrow room and I lost my simulacrum (don't know how, never managed to click on it, maybe the enemy mage had true sight up?) and got a bad start before managing to organize. I lost control of Aerie and Mazzy and went a long time without killing any enemies and drank a bunch of heal pots. Fortunately still had a couple Mass Heal left, even though basically out of single target heals, minute meteors, and most good things. Aerie and Jan both ran out of Stoneskin and took significant damage. I leveled mid fight to 11 cleric which gave me a new use of True Sight per day, which I was out of and really needed against their mage. One of the big things I did was get out of the room but leave some summons behind to distract their casters. They didn't have any spells that really screwed me too badly, besides the confusion/hold type stuff but I used Keldorns Dispel Magic ability a bunch on everyone and then recast chant after and that helped. My Earth Elemental went hostile so that didn't help. I used pause at end of round for a lot of the fight (which pauses on the round of every character and summon, so it happens a ton). Scary/fun chaotic fight.

Dual classed at only 3k xp past level up, before quest rewards, perfect timing. 45k quest reward gave me +5 mage levels. Wanted to dump entire party and read scrolls (and erase spells and read more scrolls until I ran out of money), but Mazzy was getting mad about her poisoned sister, so i just learned magic missile, agannazar's scorcher (was available at coronet, acid arrow wasn't), minute meteors and stoneskin and went to do that quest. sold items up to 30k gold. starting mazzy quest at 48k mage xp. first time going to trademeet. And when i got to trademeet, Jan complained I wasn't doing his quest in slums :( Hope I can help Mazzy's sister without running into Cernd or Rasaad or getting pushed into starting the trademeet animals/druids quest.

Barl died fast to 3 people with minute meteors. Easy quest. I got teleported back to Mazzy's house before I could loot Barl which is kinda funny. Rested 3 times to get Mazzy back, then went to do Jan's quest.

Jan Sick Girl Quest (1 petrify trap death): When searching the coronet i stumbled into a fight with the coronet guards but then the game crashed. went the other way after reloading and killed the myconid king for no loot. Using Yoshimo because Jan stayed with the sick girl. Keldorn got petrified by a trap, this time rejoining my party worked fine. Found the Hidden, did not fully search the area at all. Killed the guys he wanted (easy), lots of walking around, quest complete. Also figured I should buy all the containers I see and put extras at a copper coronet table.


Dumped party at 69k xp with 30k gp. Mazzy went to Trademeet, the are at Coronet. Bought out all the bad spells and learned them repeatedly using erase. Made a mistake and learned Spell Trap level 9, meant to save that scroll. Used genius and mind focusing potions for 25 int so I never failed scribing. Finished scrolls at: 773k xp, 86 gp. Total scribing xp: 704k

Spells erased by level: 1x77, 2x28, 3x30, 4x7, 5x6 (281k xp from erasing, 40%)

Sum of spell levels bought for my 30k gold: rough estimate 210, 30% of the xp. (It's just under 100 gold per spell level for level 1-3 spells with my 24cha, 18rep, but I also spent extra buying some spells I didn't have.)

Instant dual class to 12/11 mage/cleric, I made it!! The target xp was 750k. I didn't even check until after. If I'd started at 0xp I would have been 46k short but I do have some higher level scrolls leftover that I saved, so I could have made it (plus I could sell a few items for more gold). Note that I was saving most of my scrolls all game for this and had more than a scroll case full. Wouldn't have finished my dual without the erasing spells strategy. It's kinda tedious to buy a bunch of trash spells, erase them, learn them, erase them, learn them, etc, but it's worth it, it increases your character's power level a lot faster than regular playtime.

Got a familiar in my pack for the hp. Set up Minor Sequencer with Mirror Image + Blur. Set up Contingency with Outiluke's Resilient Sphere at 25% hp. I should remember I can put cleric spells in these, I don't know what's best yet. Chant + Bless is a decent minor sequencer.

Some notes on my stratgies so far: I've been using Death Ward on my PC a lot when prebuffing, ever since having three to death spells. I use Chant a ton. When there is a big fight I often leave the room, prebuff and go back in (people usually don't follow if you leave immediately). Prebuffing includes Protection from Evil 10' Radius, haste, Invisibility 10' Radius, MMM, Stoneskin (except I just run around with that all the time, so it's already on), true sight, draw upon holy might, remove fear, bless, protection from fire/cold (level 2 priest version), aid. I'll precast summons for fights which aren't through a door/stairs, but I can't always do it. Jan was using Shield amulet before I gave him AC3 bracers.

Another major tactic I use is scouting with an invisible thief, then often i'll start with Web once I know the positioning. Another big tactic is cast MMM and kill most stuff pretty easily lol.

Got new party setup: me, mazzy, minsc, yoshimo, aerie, cernd. I met Rasaad and removed him. Went to the Druid Grove and rested right after travelling to set Cernd's spells. Did Trademeet (killed Faldorn and the rakshasa), was easy, no resting needed. I bought a Robe of the Good Archmagi and few level 6 spells I didn't have with the reward money, and 2 Minor Sequencer. I went back and found the boys in Imnesvale that I'd bought ale for, and went back and killed the Iron Golem at De'Arnise. I also did the Limited Wish one-time XP wish with my Simulacrum. Some trolls had respawned at De'Arnise which I found strange. 852k xp, 62 gp

(1 reputation reload) Did the questline with Cernd's son. Then he left (with a few pieces of gear!), so I went to Neera. Doing the Daxus rescue, he died and my rep went to 9 somehow with commoners hostile after the fight. I think an aoe hit someone i didn't have vision of. I didn't want to mess up the Neera plotline or deal with hostile commoners and low rep, so I reloaded. My main goal is avoiding reloads from combat. I know I didn't actually lose much here, just a bit of story and some gold, but it didn't seem fun to play on with that result. Pretty minor for a first reload, but I really don't expect to get through the game with no reloads anyway.

(1 reputation reload) Doing the Red Wizard Enclave fight for Neera, my game crashed. The fight was going pretty badly because I sent Minsc in and Berserked him. Really bad idea. I should just never ever use that ability. I needed to just keep everyone out of the room. I ended up using 2 Rod of Ressurection charges to keep Minsc up, and Neera died because she ran in the room with the enemies from her stupid AI, while having a ranged weapon equipped and then she got webbed and couldn't retreat. I got improved invis off on Minsc which was helping, but not on Neera. I really hope when I get patch 1.3 it stops crashing so much. I did another reload because of killing an innocent, they stuck a bartender in the middle of a huge fight, he died right at the start so I just tried again and aimed further away from him. Seems like bad design to put a large fight and make aoe realy unsafe. Could have kept going but meh. You do get to free the bartender afterwards for 5k xp, it sort of makes sense but it's really harsh game design to put neutral people next to enemies as a kind of trap. Game crashed again while looting after the fight to save Gramm from Laneth. I was pretty confused in the fight, I tried to attack Laneth several times, but it wasn't work, I wasn't sure why, then I ignored her and killed everyone else and she wasn't attacking me. The area is really confusing btw cuz you can talk your way in but there are still hostile red wizards right there, and you're killing them while thayan guards ignore it. Apparently Lanneth was standing in the front room when I tried to leave to memorize Knock (Yoshimo couldn't open one of the doors.) Didn't have much trouble with her at that point.

Release subjects 55, 13, 11, 42 in that order. Seems dumb I never got to do the hairband quest or crafting the teleport medallion thing. it gave me those quests and the daxus quest at the same time, i went bridge district and got the hairband and got daxus, then i go back and it's too late to turn in the hairband, then after i rescue people i still can't do it. bad design.

New party: Keldorn, Anomen, Mazzy, me, Aerie, Nalia. Bought stacks of lesser restoration, friends, identify, knock and dispel magic scrolls. Bought Sensate Amulet. 1500 gold now. 916k xp. Got Nalia funeral quest. Then checked the door I hadn't gone through under the graveyard but it wasn't a lock you can pick, so actually I had fully cleared that area for now. Then I freed the slaves at the Copper Coronet, would have been nice to do that earlier and get some cheaper scrolls and some good weapons. Bought the sling with unlimited magic bullets and a Simulacrum scroll which I want to have my Simulacrum from the helm use to get 2 (see if that works or not). Then Nalia got taken by Isaea. It dumped all her gear into my inventory apparently. Getting Yoshimo and going to free her ASAP. Gave back Wellyn's bear, now going to Isaea's house.

Got Nalia back no problem. Went coronet sewers, the blade riddle thing is confusing. Freed the kids at the slaver stockade and got +1 rep for giving them 100 gold. 20 rep now. Finished off the slaver building. Then did the derelict house nextdoor, not sure what the scroll means. Then Borinall's house which had nothing much, though Nalia had to use knock there and in the stockade, her lock picking sucks (but she has 105 traps with the danger ring). Got another +1 rep for talking to Hendak after saving the slaves. Anomen got his knighthood and up to 16 wisdom.

Cult of the Eyeless: Entered old tunnels from sewers at 990k xp. Agreed to help the cult to get access. Aerie got hit with a level drain trap. Killed the shade lich without taking much damage using True Sight, Breach, MMM, attacking. Bridge answers: life (7), time (9), current step (4?). got 2 wrong answers. Got the part from the temple. Made a simulacrum with my helm, then had it use a scroll of simulacrum (also had it heal my party and lesser restoration aerie). the copy of the copy only had level 1 mage spells (seems wrong, levels should go 12 -> 7 -> 4 with rounding down) and no quickslots, so it wasn't OP, and it visually looked like it had no gear, and it couldn't attack or use items from backpack or quickslots, it just had innate abilities and mage spells. and none of the copies get priest spells, they seem to only copy my primary class for a dual class character. Also the copy of a copy had minor sequencer but it didn't do anything. I looted the cult rooms then went in the pit and did the huge undead fight. got the burning earth sword which is nice. would have been better if i'd bought azuredge before coming. got the 18dex gloves :D :D :D That got Keldorn -8 AC. The beholder boss was no problem using the rod. The fight with 2 big and 2 small beholder near the bottom was harder, took a good amount of damage, but won safely enough. The fight with the priests in the middle I used greater malision, web and cloudkill. followed by silence and hold person and archery. that worked no problem. went and returned the rift device to the temple. Went back to the cult and fought a few guys, got girdle of fortitude (8 hour duration, once per day, not permanent) and a nice xbow. Note there is a secret door at the top of the sewers, a little right of center, which i can't open. Did all this without resting :) Got accepted in the Helm church. I can now rest in the Helm building and I got a quest to get an artist to work for my church. Finished up at 1118k xp, 25k gp

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I had the difficulty lowered from leveling up. I think since I got level 12 on mage. :( I remember lowering for that big level up because I wasn't positive what would happen with clerics have 9 hitdice and mages have 10 (answer: I only get 9 hitdice, only get my con bonus for 9 levels). The Neera red wizard thing would have been a lot harder I guess. Cult of the Eyeless, Slavers and Trademeet I didn't really have any close calls. I had actually noticed the game feeling a bit easier, but I thought it was from gear/levels (which is still true too).

Plan now is to buy Azuredge and Spell Sequencer from Coronet, then do the temple art quest, then pay the 15k for Imoen rescue, then swap Jaheira and maybe someone else into my party.

Cernd is in the Derril house, I thought I'd have to go get him from his grove later. I moved him to the Coronet. Got the Ore (didn't give fake ore) and finished the art quest. Leveled to 13 mage and got a ring for memorizing 4 extra priest spells! 1171k xp, 5k gp after paying for help with Imoen. Party is anomen/keldorn/mazzy/me/aerie/nalia. Also I put scripts: mazzy for wizard killer, keldorn/anomen aggressive, me/aerie ranged, nalia on scout thief. Ugh that makes nalia stop detecting traps to try to stealth. The amulet of power is really good. switching my minor sequencer to mirror image + sanctuary now instead of vocalize. Also noticed I didn't have a contingency up, not sure what happened to it, so i remade that. I found Mr Ployer at the Sea's Bounty tavern, from the note he sounds like a bad guy, but no interesting dialog is currently available.

Got into the harper base, found one of their amulets but didn't go up to the second floor yet. got another helm of charm protection from one of their rooms, but it doesn't work on confusion so it's not that great. I fought a vampire at the docks, next i'm posing as a new recruit. Killed them, off to the graveyard.

Tanova Stunned Anomen, me and Nalia, Mazed Keldorn, and disrupted Aerie's spell casting on the remove paralysis. But Mazzy's archer came through for me. The spike/blood room was interesting. I took some damage, drank some pots, searching for traps didn't seem to work. Left. Still unclear on what wooden stakes do. In the blood room behind the secret door, I could enter it, but I was too scared to.

On the bottom floor, pretty unfortunately I didn't check the map size and used simulacrum after the main fight. made a fire elemental army (+ use 2 restoration scroll, 2 anti-magic scroll, and 4 rod of ressurections), then walk in on laskell and he says fight on top floor and summons can't travel up there. Lashkell died easily, not sure if due to my summons or from Azuredge. wasn't sure how to finish them off. braved the blood with nalia, got a great anti-UD mace. Oh I figured it out, you get a sword icon in the coffin room, staked 3 vamps. Bohdi fight was pretty scary, she spawned on Aerie and hit her for 2/3 of her hp and level drain. I ran Aerie away and Bohdi chased for several rounds, but then eventually stopped and it was easy from there.

At Brynnlaw Island I finally got a small amount of value from Clairvoyance. I got 2000 gold from a limited wish. saved the poor kids. fought my way to claire. killed the cowled wizard guy for his wardstone. he had spelltrap and mislead, but i had attacking and truesight. got the book of infinite spells which is pretty cool. can't tell how many more pages it has. leaving it on fireball for now since that's pretty good. off to spellhold. 1334k xp

Spellhold: It was pretty obvious that was Irenicus, but you can't do anything. Lost a con. Bhaal was easy with a simulacrum from my helm. I'm taking Imoen and leaving Nalia behind after stripping her items. Imoen gained 3 mage levels to 11, still a lot less than me. Read well over 500k xp of scrolls, but the xp was split up some. Set up vocalize+sanctuary minor sequencer on aerie, mirror image + detect invis for imoen.

First thing in the maze is umberhulks. I took a lot of damage there, keldorn got confused but i used improved invis to protect him. I should have had at least one long duration summon up before that fight started. Then invisible imoen goes scouting and walks into a lich, who sees me even though i have a cloak of non detection. It's got protection from magical weapons and spell trap to start, and then when i run away a bit it casts time stop but doesn't actually do anything visible to me for the whole timestop. I sent in some skeletons and some greater mummies split up from the lich and came out to fight me. then i fought the lich. symbol death appeared to make imoen roll a save despite being over 60 hp, i don't understand that. aerie saved too. i didn't understand the fight very well. i tried to use true seeing, breach, MMM and attack. i got a ton of weapon has no effect but won anyway, i'm not really sure what was and wasn't working. Then I staked Dace and got his hand. Did the magic tome that summons monsters, no problem, and the kobolds around the crystal.

The character scripts are really annoying. It kept making my main character run back, thief not attack, and mazzy do melee.

(1 trap death) After doing the right side, I found a bag of holding on the top. Went bottom and 2 yuan-ti mages cast chaos at the same time and it affected 5 of my party. aerie cast dispel magic but it didn't dispel it for anyone. mazzy almost killed imoen and everyone got hurt a lot before it ended right as i was webbing the whole group to stop them from fighting. Hit level 14 mage and found a Project Image scroll at the same time :D I opened the crystal thing to the exit, but went exploring the rest of the area anyway.

Imoen died to the crusher trap. Did 12/12 riddles with 0 errors, got the regen ring. Did two fights at the blue portal thing, need to find the other gem. Tried the statues riddle but didn't get it right away, trying again now. OK figured it out and got the last gem. I prebuffed a bunch including Tensor's Transformation (the previous demon guy hurt me a lot, so I was worried it'd be harder) and then it was a genie giving me armor, not a fight, lol. And the armor isn't even good lol. It's just +3 plate, which is slightly worse than +1 full plate, which is worse than fullplate combined with a +1 ring/neck/cloak (which gives the AC and also saving throw.)

(1 combat death) Keldorn died to the Ulithard doing Devour Brain. Got the minotaur door open, but going back to figure out the other 3 doors near the start of this level, I only did the mind flayer painting one so far. Well it took a while but I found the paintings. Also I got my party fatigued in the haste/slow room that I don't really understand. Wanted to finish the area without resting, used 9 charges from staff of curing among other things. got both kinds of boots with 6 extra tokens, got the paintings done. Figured out how the healing room works on the way out lol. the two in the middle are the good ones, middle left heals the person in the middle of the room, middle right hastes party (which can be bad, leads to fatigue). Doing more sanity tests now. I got 3 right, then might have got one wrong, the answer was ambiguous, not sure. Found the cloak of reflection. I didn't get to loot the stones at the big circlular ring place with kobold/goblin archers before being teleported, I hope I go back there or didn't miss something good. She said I passed all the tests. Three people leveled from the quest xp! Well I didn't get back to those stones to loot, and I might have missed somethign after the quest too, I found one thing then went up the stairs and couldn't go back down.

Lonk the Sane killed Keldorn with Finger of Death, but the game crashed while I was picking his gear back up midcombat. Beat him quickly the second time. Going into the Irenicus fight with very little resources and all my guys fatigued a bunch, lol, we'll see how this goes. Yeah it was fine with the inmates fighting with me and clicking on Irenicus and ignoring the clones. I chose taking the ship over the portal, sounded a bit safer. I hope Nalia ends up back at the Copper Coronet somehow. I wanted to go fight the pirate lord but I can't open the door guard guy is gone. Stole the horn, sailed off, got shipwrecked in Sahaguin city. Rested and set up spells. Agreed to help the exile prince do a coup. 1744k xp Got cloak of mirroring, wtf, block all spell dmg !?

(1 petrify trap death) Clear out sahaguin area, found the door requiring the tooth and the big undead fight. then found the imp game and agreed to play. not sure where the rebel prince is, everyone just attacked me even though i have the orb. Keldorn tried to play the game and got petrified, doh, wasn't expecting traps in the game area. Aerie had Heal for efficiently refilling his hp after the petrify :) And used stone to flesh scroll cuz keldorn is the one with the earth control ring that could do it. Placed all the items correctly first try. lol beholder. Oh I read my journal more carefully, so the rebel prince is outside the door (not sure how they threw him out, i guess you can swim between places just not walk?) Got the fake heart. Won the fight easily. Crashed yet again after. rested and went in underdark!

(1 combat death) I don't understand the air elemental portal thing. i killed like 10. easy xp. 1882k now, dinged level 15 mage. Spent down to 1k gold on scrolls, drank int pots, and then read 200k xp of scrolls (divided 6 ways). Fought like 10 earth eles too, aerie and keldorn leveled. Drow fight was fun. Did triple skull trap spell sequencer on them, did nothing. Their offense wasn't so great though, they made some summons and didn't do a ton to me. Tangle with some mindflayers accross a ravine, they stunned a bunch of people. Lesson: don't do the dispel magic contingency thing. I got stunned, lost all my contingencies, and dispelled some of my own stuff including a project image i'd just cast (my first one!). Imoen got charmed and I spammed dispel magic and couldn't end it. And I used a simulacrum to rod of ressurection her to keep her alive – my summons kept trying to attack her. Gonna need some chaotic commands next rest maybe. After doing the fire elementals I fought some kua-toa and i lost control of anomen and he died. Rested twice to set up new contingencies, res him, set his spells, etc. I now set it up with charm protection helms on mazzy/anomen, and shield of harmony for keldorn, and went much more MMM heavy on spells, with a good amount of summons and some alternative aoes: ice storm, chain lightning, cloudkill, confusion, chaos, cone of cold, holy smite, and of course web. I also no longer trust invisibility to work very reliably, so I switched some slots over to mirror image.


(1 combat death) Fought the Balor at the Svirfneblin village. Long fight. Made a bunch of summons. Made a project image that made a simulacrum. the project image had all my priest spells, but the simulacrum had mage spells only and no gear/quickslots, but it was still useful for doing several MMM. Most of my damage was from MMM. The Project Image was great because I could use rod of ressurection to heal people without worrying about running out of charges lol, i also used a simulacrum scroll and 2 anti-mage scrolls on it. It had magic resist and +2 arrows didn't hurt it. It hit really hard and I had some morale failures. It didn't do many spells apart from 2 holds. When I ran out of tanks it came and hit Aerie. I paused and then had her cast stoneskin which has a casting time of only 1, but she got hit again and died before it went off. Lower Resist would have been nice I guess, but it'd take two casting for like half my spells to work. 26,000 xp for the balor, i think that might be my biggest single enemy so far. Got the illusion so I look drow, neat.

(1 combat reload, 3 combat deaths, 1 silly reload) Drow city, got quest and went and fought the illithids to save the girl. then went east and got captured by illithids and fought in their arena. On the way out, party got split up walking around, anomen ran in front and got held by an illithid then attacked and died to devour brain right before mazzy killed it. rezzed. Got the mind flayer control circlets then tried to capture one but mazzy shot it down right as i controlled it. then it wouldn't respawn. i googled and it's supposed to respawn so my game is bugged, but people said to use slayer form to get through the door instead. RIP 2 rep. Then I died to slayer form, having never used it before, didn't expect it to just kill me so quickly. Then I died to the next room: hard fight, i tried to retreat immediately but people got stunned in the narrow corridor and i couldn't get them unstunned and organize a retreat fast enough to somewhere reasonable to fight, and i hadn't prebuffed (i'd actually lost all buffs from resting trying to get a mind flayer to spawn to use the control circlet on), and i cast 2 webs and it didn't work on the mind flayers at all. Tried again with lots of prebuffs, especially a chaotic commands. Game was kinda buggy. I sent my main character with chaotic commands and 5 skeletons ahead, and they didn't spawn in the same room as before. I pushed on to another room and found and beat a similar group but then the original group did spawn when i brought everyone, which took me by surprise. i recovered pretty well, used a remove paralysis, did ok. mazzy died. anomen almost died but teleport field saved him! In the next room, keldorn died, these guys are hard with their killing you even at high hp. and dispel magic doesn't seem to work when mindflayers charm my guys, tried a lot. I'm taking a break then being more careful after.

(3 combat deaths) I thought that anti-magic scroll would protect me from illithid stuff. it does not. anomen then died with all the brine potions and the illithids walked out of the room to my party which wasn't really prepared, mazzy and aerie died too. used one of the control cirlets, managed to prevent a wipe. ugh. Finished off the illithids without any more problems at least.

Total Status: 1 major reload, 3 minor reloads, 22 deaths (12 combat, 7 traps, 3 death spells)

(1 combat death) Western caverns Aerie died, was being too careless with pathing and she went in front and got stunned and targetted. Did some Ust Natha quests, no problem. still got stealing the dragon eggs and the magic rope thing for the lich building. and i haven't done the beholder area to the south.

End of part 1. I don't know if I'll write notes like this for the rest of the game, even assuming I come back and finish it. If I do, I'll make another blog post and also link them here.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Pamela Geller Misreports Amnesty International

So there I was trying to correct Pamela Geller's poor scholarship for the second time. Then this happened:

http://pamelageller.com/2015/03/amnesty-international-palestinians-committed-war-crimes-killed-more-palestinian-civilians-than-israel.html/



If you have difficulty reading the picture, it says I was blocked from commenting on her site. Here is the full text of what I tried to tell her about the article:
Title:
> Amnesty International: Palestinians Committed War Crimes, Killed more Palestinian civilians than Israel

Text:
> Amnesty International said Thursday that Palestinian rocket fire during the 2014 summer war in Gaza had killed more civilians in the Gaza Strip than in Israel.

These do not match. Killing more civilians "than Israel" and "than in Israel" are different things.

The title means: Palestinians killed more Palestinian civilians than the number of Palestinian civilians that Israel killed.

The text about what Amnesty said means: Palestinians killed more Palestinian civilians than the number of Israeli civilians that Palestinians killed.

Please get the story right. These kinds of details are very important.
An important and helpful comment, right? It's a big difference whether Amnesty said anything about how many civilians Israel killed, or didn't discuss that at all. Well, it turns out she blocked me from commenting after I tried to correct a previous error she made... (Which she did not fix.)

Sad.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

SENS Against Specialization and Division of Labor

SENS has a budget of around 4 million dollars a year.

from this, they are unwilling to spend much or any on their website. (not sure the exact amount, i know they’ve asked for volunteers, and whatever they bought or didn’t buy is low quality.)

i would strongly suspect they ARE willing to spend some money on an accountant, a lawyer, and perhaps a few other non-SENS-specific functions. as well they should be.

they also should spend money on a website. it’s not very hard to buy quality web knowledge and work. it’s readily available on the market at prices very low compared to the value provided, and easily affordable on their budget.

this is something many other organizations do. it’s not a weird FI-only idea. SENS is frankly just plain incompetent here.

there are some other areas where SENS is making similar errors which are less well understood in general, and where useful expertise is less readily available to purchase.

if you want a good website, you can have that set up tomorrow. it’s no problem at all to find a person or group. if you want a GREAT website, you should shop around some, but it’s not that hard.

what if you want economics expertise? SENS deals with quite a bit of money – around 4 million a year. that’s enough that i think they should spend more than $0/yr on economics expertise (at least if they could find some to hire – which i strongly suspect is completely possible despite the market for it being more problematic than for websites).

further, SENS wants to deal with at least 100 million a year. they have openly and explicitly asked the public for that amount as a minimum for the project they regard as most important (robust mouse rejuvenation). and they want that 100 million budget for 10 years or more. that is a LOT of money. if 4 million a year is too trivial to merit more than $0 of economics knowledge (i disagree!!!), surely 100 million a year has room in the budget for economics expertise. yet i don’t believe SENS would hire economics expertise even at that budget level. they expressed serious hostility to this kind of thinking. they don’t see why people dealing with huge quantities of money would need to know anything about money. additionally, i pointed out that they ought to understand how to use the budget they request BEFORE requesting it, which they were also hostile to.

but actually SENS already has some economics knowledge. everyone who works at SENS knows SOMETHING about economics. it is amateur level knowledge. they are dabblers. they think that’s good enough. they think they are clever enough to get by, and/or economics is easy, and/or what’s well known about economics is all they need to know and knowing anything more would be pointless. that is very foolish.

suppose, hypothetically, that Aubrey de Grey (AdG) is smarter than anyone working in the field of economics. and suppose that AdG puts an equivalent of 2 hours a month of his SENS work into thinking related to economics issues. this is completely plausible. he thinks about money, how to get money, different places money comes from, what to do with money, and so on.

what are the consequences?

nothing but disaster, even though, by premise, AdG is smarter than any economist.

first, AdG is by far the best person to do some tasks – such as explain SENS on podcasts. the consequences are either to do without that, or to have someone worse at it do it. either it’s going to be done 2 hours less per month, or someone lesser to the amazing genius AdG would be doing it in his place – a huge loss. the only way this SENS podcast advocacy would not be lost is if there is something even more important AdG is giving up instead – something where to an even greater extent than SENS podcasting, AdG is the best suited to do it – in which case if he freed up 2 hours per month it would go to that even more important task instead.


second, AdG is not an economics specialist. being the smartest person in the world could not make up for this. why? because the more time you spend on economics, the more you can specialize in the field. if you only work on economics 2 hours a month, for SENS, that will justify very little or no time spent reading economics books. but a specialist, who does economics work for 100 hours per month, could very reasonably also devote 20 hours per month to reading economics books. this is a huge advantage which more than makes up for AdG being the smarter clever person in general. additionally, during those 100 hours per month of economics work, the specialist will gain benefits too. he’ll get accustomed to many common economics problems and get practice at solving them quickly. all that practice and experience and familiarity will help. and the specialist will keep up-to-date better than the non-specialist, because he does frequent work in the field which will benefit from staying up-to-date. and the specialist will be able to have discussions where he challenges his views about economics, tests them in debate, listens to people with new ideas, and so on. why will he find time for those things? because he spends so 100 hours per month doing economics work, any little improvement in his craft will be 50 times as valuable to him as it will be to AdG who spends 2 hours per month. (and actually the difference is larger, because a specialist is expected to know his field, and will care about his reputation in the field, whereas AdG will be recognized as wearing many hats, and barely dealing with economics, and will therefore be forgiven for not doing it as well as a specialist would be expected to.)

so there is a double issue. AdG would be giving up time to do what he’s better at than economics – doing the stuff where is able to get the most valuable work done per hour – and he would also be at a huge disadvantage due to not specializing in economics.

and even if AdG was so great he could do economics work equally well, and twice as fast, as an economist, he STILL shouldn’t do it. because his advantage at SENS work is even larger than that. if AdG can do SENS-specific work three times as well as the next best person, and economics work twice as well, then he should only do SENS work and hire an economist (for twice the number of hours it’d take AdG). That beats having to hire someone to do SENS work in place of AdG for three times the number of hours!

put another way: suppose AdG can create $300 per hour of value doing SENS work, or $200 per hour of value doing economics. i think the real ratio is more like 100 to 1, rather than 1.5 to 1, but this will illustrate my point. And suppose if AdG hires people to do these things instead of him, the best people he can find aren’t as good as him – they can create $100 of value per hour for SENS work or economics work. Then very simply, AdG should not do economics work – he’s better off outsourcing that, even though he’s (hypothetical) the best in the world at it, because his advantage at SENS work is even greater. he is relatively more productive when doing SENS work over economics work. and other people are equally productive. (more realistically, SENS is obscure and economics is common, so other people in general would be relatively more productive at economics work over SENS work, which would only increate the advantage of AdG sticking to SENS work).

this last point i’ve explained is a well known economics concept called "comparative advantage”.

if you ask AdG if he knows what comparative advantage is, and how it works, my guess is that he does. yet i still think it’s important to hire an economics specialist to help advise on topics including comparative advantage. why? because there are different senses of understanding comparative advantage.

a specialist would have an ACTIVE understanding of comparative advantage – he will have used the concept many times in many different situations. he will be able to recognize, pro-actively, many times he’d be able to use it. he’ll have experience stretching it to use in all kinds of cases where it doesn’t obviously apply.

someone like AdG, who spends little time on economics, would have a PASSIVE understanding of comparative advantage. he would be able to tell you what it is IF YOU ASK HIM. he might bring it up himself in a few situations – especially if you asked him about international trade between countries, especially countries where one is at a big advantage (e.g. industrial first world country trading with a third world poor country). That’s the best known context for thinking about comparative advantage, and the most common one discussed when the concept taught. But AdG hasn’t read books about all the other situations comparative advantage is relevant to, he hasn’t practiced finding ways to use it in many situations. His way of knowing what it is if you ask is completely different than superior sort of understanding that a specialist would have.

so even when AdG thinks, “oh i’ve got this, i know what comparative advantage is, there’s no need for an economics specialist to tell me that” he would be wrong.

there is no way SENS gets by with an actual expense of $0 on economics. it is relevant to what they do. they must think about it some. depending on their ideas about economics, it would to some extent lead them to different strategies. and AdG discusses economics in his book _Ending Aging_ very literally – he tries to explain his ideas about the effect on the country, economy (including medical prices), government, and world if everyone had AIDs and we had to produce enough AIDs medicine for everyone. That is very clearly partly an economics issue.

so AdG and/or others at SENS, who are not economics specialists, inefficiently do some economics work, instead of sticking to SENS-specific work that they are, relatively, better at doing. and i think they make some large mistakes due to their arrogance to do work outside their fields. and they are completely hostile to the idea that maybe they should spend more than $0 getting specialist help with economics, rather than sacrificing SENS-specific work to dabble in it themselves. the people at SENS may be pretty smart, but there are very smart people working on economics too, and it’s HARD even for people who study it extensively and specialize in it. it’s completely unrealistic and unreasonable for SENS to be like, “ok we’re doing the most important thing in the world. now for this AIDS hypothetical, and some other matters, let’s try amateur hour. we can probably get away with that. it’ll be fine. and it doesn’t require any humility or respect for other people who aren’t doing what is obviously the most important work in the world.”

all of what i’ve said applies to other topics besides economics. they dabble in many other areas: philosophy of critical thinking, philosophy of science, philosophy of persuasion, political philosophy (they have various ideas about the government and its agencies, and how to deal with them and talk about them), and some rather different fields like how to run a charity fundraiser (an area where they have made big mistakes such as using matching donation fundraising). and what about marketing? they appear completely clueless about that. it’s ridiculous that they don’t have a specialist guiding them to do a much better job with marketing. i’ll let Steve Jobs explain this one:

Becoming Steve Jobs: the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli:
[Context: Seva is a philanthropy type foundation. They are having a meeting, at the start, about how the make the world better. One of the guys had just been significantly involved in eradicating smallpox in India. Now they want to make Seva and do more. What would be the best thing to work on? They decide on curing blind people in the third world.]

[Steve Jobs] sat down and started listening. The decision to create a foundation had already been made; the question now on the table was how to tell the world about Seva, its plans, and the men and women who would implement those plans. Steve found most of the ideas embarrassingly naïve. The discussion seemed more appropriate for a PTA meeting; at one point, everyone but Steve heatedly debated the finer points of a pamphlet they wanted to create. A pamphlet? That’s the best these people could dream up? These so-called experts may have achieved notable progress in their own countries, but here they were clearly out of their league. Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.

As the discussion meandered, Steve found his own attention wandering. “He had walked into that room with his persona from the Apple board meeting,” Brilliant remembers, “but the rules for doing things like conquering blindness or eradicating smallpox are quite different.” From time to time he’d pipe up, but mostly to interject a snide remark about why this or that idea could never fly. “He was becoming a nuisance,” says Brilliant. Finally, Steve couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you this as someone who knows a thing or two about marketing. We’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand machines at Apple Computer, and when we started no one knew a thing about us. Seva is in the same position Apple was in a couple of years ago. The difference is you guys don’t know diddly about marketing. So if you want to really do something here, if you really want to make a difference in the world and not just putter along like every other nonprofit that people have never heard of, you need to hire this guy named Regis McKenna—he’s the king of marketing. I can get him in here if you’d like. You should have the best. Don’t settle for second best.”
The result? They made Steve Jobs cry (yes, literally) and kicked him out of the meeting (yes, literally). (And then, I take it, did a much worse job fighting blindness than they could have). That’s how hostile and unreasonable they were. They wanted to do this extremely important humanitarian work (their own view), but they absolutely would not consider hiring some world class expertise to do it right.

And SENS, which claims to be basically the most important thing in the world, and which has enough money to hire help, won’t hire top experts either – be it about economics, marketing, philosophy, fundraising, or even making a good website.

By the way, I’m not even going to send AdG a link to this, even though we had a long discussion before. I wrote to him to tell him I’d given up on SENS – and why. He did not reply. He is too unreasonable to talk to, or tell things like this. He won’t listen. I think it’s hopeless. It’s a ridiculous situation. I may well literally die because AdG won’t listen, and yet he convinced me to give up (I just had a some thoughts I wanted to write down, because it’s interesting and I think about things like this, but in another month maybe I’ll forget about SENS).

I could fucking cry.

Steve Jobs apologized to Seva for trying to help. At least I won't be apologizing to SENS.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (5)

Mises Values Philosophy

Marxism Unmasked by Ludwig von Mises (transcripts of lectures from 1952):
THE FIRST FIVE LECTURES IN THIS SERIES will be on philosophy, not on economics. Philosophy is important because everybody, whether or not he knows it, has a definite philosophy, and his philosophical ideas guide his actions.

The philosophy of today is that of Karl Marx [1818–1883]. He is the most powerful personality of our age. Karl Marx and the ideas of Karl Marx—ideas which he did not invent, develop, or improve, but which he combined into a system—are widely accepted today, even by many who emphatically declare that they are anti-communist and anti-Marxist.To a considerable extent, without knowing it, many people are philosophical Marxists, although they use different names for their philosophical ideas.
In a later lecture:
It is impossible to defeat a philosophy if you do not fight in the philosophical field. One of the great deficiencies of American thinking—and America is the most important country in the world because it is here, not in Moscow, that this problem will be decided—the greatest shortcoming, is that people think all these philosophies and everything that is written in books is of minor importance, that it doesn’t count. Therefore they underrate the importance and the power of ideas. Yet there is nothing more important in the world than ideas. Ideas and nothing else will determine the outcome of this great struggle. It is a great mistake to believe that the outcome of the battle will be determined by things other than ideas.
This could have been written by Ayn Rand (who was the best advocate of the importance of philosophy).

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Communists Didn't Mean Well

Confessions of a Philosopher, by Bryan Magee, p 208-209:
When I [Bryan Magee] asked him [Bertrand Russell] who he regarded as the greatest man he had ever met, he needed longer to consider his reply. In the end he came up with Lenin. When I asked why, he said it was because Lenin combined a brilliant mind with genius-level ability as a man of action, and this gave him extraordinary stature and effectiveness as a person. Also, he had changed the entire course of world history in a way few individuals ever do. However, he added, Lenin was not in the least morally admirable: he came near to boasting about the enormous scale of the death and suffering he was causing, and laughed about it in conversation with Russell.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Message (1)

Political Philosophy Summary

Here is a short summary of my ideas, with an emphasis on political philosophy.

Objective reality exists, and humans can know about it. People create knowledge (learn) by reason. Reason works by evolution, which works by error correction – many candidate ideas/genes/replicators which contain randomness and error, and a selection process that eliminates bad ones. No alternatives to evolution are known. What makes a person rational is that they do a good job of keeping open ways for any mistakes in their ideas to get corrected. Major tools here are keeping an open mind and participating in critical discussion; these contrast with irrationality like being arrogant, over-confident, and disinterested in criticism and other ideas.

Political philosophy and economics do not stand in isolation. Everyone has and uses a philosophy, including when considering political philosophy and economics. The only question is whether they say what their philosophy is, accept the philosophy is affecting their conclusions, and keep trying to improve the philosophy and expose it to criticism, or if they claim a false philosophical neutrality and try to hide their substantive philosophical assumptions from critical discussion.

People own themselves and have a right to property. People should be free to pursue their self-interest and happiness. This will not create chaos and fighting because there are no conflicts of interest between rational men. There is an inherent harmony of mankind's interests, which laissez-faire capitalism facilitates. People benefit more from voluntary trade (which is win/win and creates value) than from fighting with each other (which is expensive and risky, and creates negative total value). When interaction mutual benefit isn't available, people should leave each other alone.

The proper purpose of government is to protect people against force (which includes physical violence, threat of violence, and fraud). Nothing else.

We do not live in a capitalist society today (2015 USA). In a capitalist society, for example, roads and parks would be privately owned, and there would be no anti-trust laws. And there would be no tax-funded welfare or pork barrel projects or other wealth redistribution. And no government bailouts or "economic stimulus" packages.

People are welcome to help others out, voluntarily. There are often good reasons to, though not always, and only for limited amounts of help that won't sacrifice the quality of one's own life.

If I want something that someone else has, I must buy it (with his voluntary agreement), persuade him to give it to me (with or without conditions, barter, etc), or leave him alone (go without it, or find a way to make my own, or hire someone else to build me one, etc).

Reason and force are incompatible opposites. Capitalism is compatible with reason, because freedom best allows for the correction of errors. When force is used, if the idea behind the force is mistaken, it's hard to fix that. It's hard to try out and learn about other ideas while under compulsion. It's hard to argue with a brute thug. In a system of force, the stronger forces his ideas on other whether they are good or bad. In a system of freedom, when people disagree, they can each keep trying life their way, they can resist errors that are merely suggested by others. With rational persuasion, people only change their mind if they think it's better, and change change their mind again if they think they see an error. A rational economic system is an extension of a rational epistemology.

See also Ayn Rand's short summary.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Discussion: Children's Rights and Other Topics

This post is a reply to three comments from an interesting reddit discussion between me and Dr_Kenneth_Noisewat about children's rights. You can find some of the context on reddit, but they deleted one of my comments at time of writing. Here is a pdf with most of the context without my writing deleted (reddit does not actually allow displaying and entire discussion at once in your browser). In any case, I've tried to write this in a self-contained way. Links to the comments I'm replying to now: 1 2 3.

Update: For posting my reply (a link to this post), I was banned from the subreddit where I was having this discussion, and my reply was deleted. No reason was given. I sent a private message to Dr_Kenneth_Noisewat so he can find this reply. No one else viewing the discussion on reddit can see this continuation. In any case, I can no longer continue the discussion on reddit. Dr_Kenneth_Noisewat, if you don't want to reply on FI list, please reply in the unmoderated blog comments or email me. I hope people learn something about reddit censorship and openness to discussion from these events. Keep in mind while reading the rest: I was banned for linking this blog post.
do you think software pets learn? they store data in memory about past interactions and act differnetly in the future.
Yes, I absolutely think so. While the definition you list here is a little simplistic, I believe it holds true to most philosophical and psychological definitions of learning.
That was not a definition. It was a statement about something software pets do, which is not the same kind of thing as human learning.
This seems to be implying that humans are distinct from animals rather than different by degrees of complexity.
Yes.
But your definition of human learning can still be refuted by using animal examples. Many animals have language (again in the same degrees of complexity).
No animal has a language in which one can write, or read, Atlas Shrugged. Whatever they have, which you call "language", is a different kind of thing than English.

Note that Atlas Shrugged can be written in Russian, Japanese, Hebrew, French, etc. All major human "natural" languages have this in common. This is not a coincidence, it's because they are universal languages (they can express all ideas which are possible to express in language), whereas the animal "languages" are not universal.
Again, I think this is implying that humans are somehow distinct from other animals, if we can model animals now it is certainly possible to model humans in the future. Some popular theories suggest that our minds are modelable as such. I think some introductory readings on the philosophy of mind and free will might help clear up some of the points that you've made here so far. I'll post a few sources for introductory material below:
http://consc.net/guide.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
The issue is not what can be modelled. The point I was making is that animals only do things which can be accounted for with non-intelligent software techniques. Humans do other things.

You are mistaken that reading those links, or similar things, will clear this up. I am well read. I have a large amount of experience debating these issues. Actually, the only way you will change my mind is by saying something new to me – which means something not found in typical introductory material.

Another issue is that material like this is written from a perspective with a certain way of thinking about philosophy, certain premises assumed, and so on. Which perspective varies some. But they pretty reliably contradict Karl Popper, Ayn Rand, or both, and do not include an explanation of where Popper and/or Rand was mistaken, so it's not suitable to persuade someone who agrees with them about most things.
Hmm, this may have been an issue of clarity on my part for simply stating "mental areas." By that, I mean puzzles and challenges designed to test reasoning, knowledge of causation, learning, and adapting to create new solutions. I highly suggest you check out the movie when you have the time because it'll clear that up. But, even if we could create programs that model animals in this way and outperform children, wouldn't that seem to state from your earlier example about software, that humans are modelable as well?
Watching the movie you recommend won't change anything because I've already seen a bunch of similar videos. I disagree. Seeing more of the same won't change that.

This is a philosophy issue and comes down to issues like: What is intelligence?

I say intelligence is a type of universality – universal knowledge creation. Understanding this requires understanding what universality is, and what knowledge is, which is best done by reading David Deutsch's (DD's) books to begin with. The best known example of universality is universal classical computers – computers which can do any computation which any classical computer can do. ("Classical" here means not using features of quantum physics that weren't in classical physics.) The iMac I am typing on is a universal classical computer. A universal knowledge creator is one that can create any piece of knowledge which any knowledge creator can create. That is what humans are, and what intelligence is. But animals aren't. This isn't a matter of degree. There is no non-universal classical computer which works anything like my iMac, no halfway. DD calls this the "jump to universality".

It's ideas like this which are at issue, and which are not addressed by the material you bring up.
consider reason and adults. you try to persaude people. if you fail, you try to think of better arguments. you don't punish him.
Except we do punish adults for breaking rules as well, especially if they haven't responded to previous attempts at reason. I would like to note here that many of the views I am expressing here are not ones that I entirely support but are more a byproduct of me playing devil's advocate to many of your ideas.
OK good to know about devil's advocate.

In general, we do not punish adults for disagreeing with us. We leave them alone, and they leave us alone. There are ways the government oversteps, but I'm not going to go into those now. I advocate minimal government.

The normal time we don't leave someone alone if he won't listen to our arguments is if he violently attacks us. Then leaving him alone is not an option, by his choice. So we can't be blamed for not leaving him alone, we haven't done anything wrong if we defend ourselves.

Put another way: if he violently attacks us, he excludes resolving the conflict by reason/persuasion or by mutually dropping the matter. If those are options, they are better. When they aren't, force is all that remains to us. (You may be able to run away or something like that. But in that case, he wanted to e.g. punch you, and what stopped him is your muscles not your mind.) With children, leaving them alone actually is an option in most scenarios where people punish children. E.g. if a child doesn't make his bed, the parent could let it go instead of punish.

The purpose of law and punishment in adult society is to protect people against violence and some related things (like threat of violence and fraud). It is not to make anyone agree with ideas or punish them for disagreeing and thinking their own way. If an adult doesn't want to learn algebra, or says he thinks algebra is false, I do not punish him, I leave him alone.
i don't think punishment is educational, only reason is. so if you do something other than reason, i don't think any learning happens.
This seems to imply that learning can only occur from reason. Let me try a counter example: If I place my hand in a fire and burn my hand, I learn to avoid placing myself in direct contact with fire.

Of course, it is also possible to state that reasoning is the basis for this learning in that after getting burned, I think: "fire can cause pain if touched, I want to avoid pain, so I should avoid touching fire." However, I think this may necessarily lead one to accepting that punishment can cause learning in a like way. Say my child takes a cookie that I told him was mine, in return I take one of his toys (while explaining that I am taking something like he did). Now the child can learn "having something of mine taken feels bad, others must feel this way too, I shouldn't steal from others." This I think may be a good middle ground between punishment and reason.
Learning involves creating knowledge. There is only one known way to do that, which is called evolution, or in the context of human thought, called learning. No one has come up with any other way.

Yes I completely agree that there is reasoning involved in learning the pain was due to touching the fire, rather than, say, not touching the fire enough.

In general, if you punish a kid he may well learn something – e.g. that you are mean. If you punish him repeatedly and aren't too inconsistent, he might work out what your punishment policies are so he can predict and avoid it. That isn't learning useful life skills though (e.g. math, physics, programming, art, public speaking, writing, salary negotiation), it's learning how to deal with being subject to authority.

You bring up a special case of punishing: if a kid hits someone, you hit the kid so he can experience that being hit hurts. And some variations on that theme. I agree this is potentially educational, unlike hitting kids in general. You can imagine a kid saying, "Oh I didn't know being hit hurt. Hit me softly, so I can see what it's like. OK now try a little harder. Now try hitting my leg instead of my chest." And then learning from being hit. This involves a controlled environment where kid is in control of the experience. You can imagine how distracting and painful it'd be, and hard to learn anything, if kid was not in control of this hitting.

You can also imagine how tons of times, the kid already knows that being hit hurts (or that having his stuff taken away sucks, etc). In those cases someone needs to learn something else to resolve the disagreement (e.g. the kid might need to learn more about how treating others well is in his own self-interest, or kid might need to learn other ways to get cookies or playtime cooperation or whatever he was after. Or parent might need to learn to buy enough cookies so they don't run out).

Whatever parent does, kid will often learn something, just like kid learns something when parent isn't there. People often learn things in life. But for parent to reasonably be helping educate the kid, and get any credit, then parent needs to do something helpful. If parent does something unwanted by kid, it is unrealistic to expect kid will learn the particular thing the parent intends. If parent wants to suggest a particular idea or perspective to kid, parent needs to be a friend not an enemy.
people (both children and adults) are not logical or reasonable 100% of the time. And if a person is being unreasonable or is not willing to listen to reason, there is little that reason can do to change their minds. That said, I think it is important to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to use reason whenever possible.
Sometimes people are unreasonable, and there is little you can do to change their minds. Yes. So what? Unless they are a criminal, leave them alone.

And if they are a criminal, don't pretend that defending yourself is you helping educate them. It's not about that, it's about defense, not help, not education.
if they STILL think drugs are a good idea, that's their opinion despite your argument. that's their freedom.
I absolutely agree with you here the problem comes in with the case of children. Children are very impressionable and so if their parents are advocating or at least displaying use of harmful drugs without warning the child of the potential dangers, they are infringing on the child's right to make an informed and uninfluenced decision.
First, no one has a right to uninfluenced decisions. Influences are everywhere. All parents influence. All parents have their own perspective and aren't totally neutral about everything. That's OK!

Now, instead of drugs, let's talk about bleach for a minute.

Child does have a right to make an informed decision about drinking bleach. Parent absolutely must not leave out sippy cups of bleach. He even needs to lock the cabinet with the bleach so his toddler doesn't get to it. And when the child is 12, the parent should have already have informed kid about the dangers of bleach, parent owes kid useful educational information like that.

Someone might say, "What if parent is wrong and actually bleach is good for you?" The general answer is that parent should present to child both his own opinions, and also mainstream opinions. At least two perspectives, not just one. (One perspective is OK when parent and the vast majority of society agrees. And of those cases, kid will sometimes ask for some alternative ideas, minority opinions, more information, etc, but lots of times he won't and there's no problem if everyone agrees.) Also, if society has several popular opinions, share all of them.

This "give parent's idea and society's idea" policy has two main purposes. It means when parent and society disagree, if parent is disastrously wrong, kid gets a different perspective, he has access to an idea that may be better. And it means when parent and society disagree, and society is disastrously wrong, kid can get parent's perspective, he again gets access to an idea that may be better.

Kid should also have access to whatever other publicly available ideas he wants, if he takes an interest in them. And he should be able to browse through them. That means access to library, YouTube, blogs, TV, Google, etc. Also note if the child decides an idea is bad part way through, and doesn't want to hear the rest, I'm definitely not saying parent should force child to sit through a boring lecture so parent does his duty to provide these ideas.

OK now back to drugs. A lot of people think drugs are very very bad. So parent has a responsibility to share this information. Even if parent thinks drugs are good, it's his job to understand, "I may be mistaken. That's conceivable, and could be a disaster if I'm mistaken and I only tell my child my idea. So I should share views from society too. And let kid think for himself, not choose for him."

People's main objection to this will be what if parent advocates something really bad, like bleach drinking (only for children I guess, or else parent would be dead), and shares information about reasons not to drink bleach, but kid agrees with parent anyway. Well what's really going on there if child gets the idea bleach is OK is parent didn't present the anti-bleach arguments fairly. So he did something very wrong with a life-or-death-issue, and stuff like this can justify interventions by the police.

But what if parent has these wonderful ideas about how bleach is so great for kids, and they are super persuasive, and he's right? Well maybe he can explain that to the police, and then they'll be so thrilled they will help him get his kid a truckload of bleach. Good luck with that...
in the free market, racism isn't such a big deal because if Target is racist you go to Walmart instead. the big problem is government racism because of lack of alternatives. one of the big things i'd suggest here is getting government to stop being involved with most of life.
Definitely part of this is due to a simple difference in political philosophy again, but I would continue to argue that alternatives themselves do not solve racism. What if all alternatives are racist? Or what if a monopoly develops and now the racist option is the only choice?
If only a small proportion of people are racist, the free market makes the impact minimal.

If most of society is racist, say against asians, then asians are in big trouble under any system. But capitalism does offer some help here. Specifically, it provides people with large financial incentives to be less racist. If one employer is willing to stop being racist against asians, he can hire them for less money than he'd have to pay a white person for the same work. If one store is willing to stop being racist against asians, he can attract more customers.

What would you propose instead? It can't be government intervention unless you reject democracy, because the racist majority won't vote to have the government to intervene against themselves.
in general i advocte no testing or qualifications at all. let anyone vote. we let stupid adults vote. why not stupid kids too?
This would be a huge problem. As said, children are impressionable, and so if an individual wants to gather more support for their views one simple option open to them would be to have more kids. I'm sure we both agree that this would be disastrous treatment towards children and consequently one of the reasons child labor laws were instituted, to stop people from having children just to make a profit.
No, I don't agree.

To start, one thing I'd point out is in a free society with a minimal government, gathering votes doesn't do you much good. If there's no porkbarrel spending, no wealth redistribution, no policies favoring particular groups over others, then there's a lot less incentive to gather votes. Some things still matter, e.g. there might be a foreign policy disagreement, but in a society where there's no pork being handed out votes are much less of a big deal. The less the government does, and more limited its powers, the less power it wields, then the less anyone will care to control it. Children who aren't allowed to vote are, of course, not at fault for the current welfare state policies where tax monies serve as loot for voting blocks, and should not be punished for that situation.

Having more kids is not a simple option. Kids take a lot of effort and cost a lot of money. A much simpler, easier and cheaper option is finding a bunch of dumb impressionable people and making an impression on them.

And btw many kids don't like their parents and, thanks to secret ballots, will easily be able to vote the opposite of what the parent wants to spite them, without getting caught.

If people took the money it costs to raise a kid, and donated it to a political party instead, that party would be able to use it to get a lot more votes than the one kid could give them. Money already indirectly buys votes a lot cheaper than the price of a kid, because many adult voters are impressionable to TV ads and other methods.

Which is not ideal, but not such a big deal either. If you don't like it, I recommend trying to spread better ideas so more people learn how to think for themselves better, and be less impressionable.
Upon reading some of BOI, looking into your community, reading some posts and other things as you have suggested; I can't say that I was surprised at your views. I had already managed to guess at quite a few of them from the discussion we'd been having.
Good. I try not to hide my ideas. I try to share them!
But, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised to find that you seem to have much more depth and breadth in your studies/research to be labeled as a simple "Ayn Rand worshiper" as I'm sure the community has done, and so I've been excited to engage with you.
Yes, OK. BTW, I think the simple "Ayn Rand worshiper" is more of a myth and a straw man than a reality. I think it's very hard to find people like that. When I go to Objectivist communities and try to talk to people, the most common problem I run into is they disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, and don't know a lot of her ideas, so we're not able to have a discussion about the advanced nuances of Ayn Rand's ideas. If anyone knew where to find simple (or nuanced) Ayn Rand worshipers, I wish they'd tell me. I would like to try talking to some people like that.
I think a lot of the bad blood towards objectivism supporters on the philosophy subreddits is not necessarily the presence of criticism that seem to be ignored. Often times in this subreddit people will come in with a reading of Ayn Rand as their only exposure to philosophy. Yet they will believe every word she says and usually have an attitude as if all the problems of philosophy have already been solved. The community has gotten tired of trying to engage with these people as they are often unreceptive and stagnant towards criticism and other ideas (I apologize for whoever as been downvoting you in this discussion we've been having).
It'd be nice if more people had broader knowledge of philosophy. This applies to people on all sides though.

I don't care about reddit down votes.

My experience is the philosophy subreddits are mostly full of people who have only been exposed to certain perspectives, and not others (not mine). I don't see much difference between that and someone who only knows the Ayn Rand side of things. One of them gave this list:
Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Foucault, Popper, Russell, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Hume, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Ayer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Machiavelli, Leibinz, Locke, Smith, Mill, Marx, Gettier, Rorty, Badiou, James, Whitehead, Dewey, Chalmers, Sellars, Platinga, Reichenbach, Adorno, Gadamer, Benjamin, Foot, Deleuze, Derrida, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Frege, Rawls, Said, Kripke, Nozick, Levi Strauss, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Xeno, Fodor and Dennet, with all the commentary from everyone that ever wrote one, and that you read the entirety of the Stanford and Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I think this is typical and representative of a perspective I've seen many times before.

That is a lot more variety than Ayn Rand's perspective alone. But it's still a limited perspective which doesn't include an understanding of Ayn Rand's ideas, and also excludes some other perspectives. (And in practice, any particular person will only really be familiar with a few of the names on that list, not all of them. And my guess is actually zero of them understand Popper well, which is one of the people who would have provided more useful variety.) And it isn't just Ayn Rand that's missing, it's liberals in general like Burke, Bastiat, Turgot, Menger, Mises, Reisman, etc. Instead they have [Adam] Smith and pretty much call it a day without any understanding of capitalism or liberalism. And when one of these people does learn something about a liberal like Burke, he often learns a particular perspective on Burke, and does not learn the way of thinking about Burke that I would agree with.

The list he wrote is kind of random too. Where's Parmenides? Where's Heraclitus? Where's Thales!? He included Anaximander and Anaxagoras, but not Thales! Why? I understand the theme where he omitted most thinkers I like because he disagrees with their way of thinking, which makes his list less diverse. But the choices of Presocratics strikes me as random.

And where's Socrates? The categorization of Socrates under "Plato" is itself a significant claim; it's part of a perspective I disagree with.

I think it's actually really notable how long a list of philosophers this person wrote while almost entirely excluding the long list of philosophers I like, or have heard of positively and intend to learn more about one day. They have their 30 people they like, and I have my 30, and there isn't a ton of overlap. They claim their perspective is really broad, but they over and over again exclude almost all the people I see value in, while listing tons of people I consider to have value far far below zero.

I'm perfectly happy to accept I have a particular perspective. All I'd say is I do read things I disagree with, and talk with people I disagree with, so I find out about other ideas even though I disagree with them. But I think most people (yes on all sides) actually have more limited perspectives than they think, and don't do nearly enough to find out about ideas they (currently) disagree with.

They should admit their perspective is very biased and limited in some ways. But they won't do that. They want to pretend their list of thinkers is all there is. Because they don't want to have to read and debate the people they don't like, at all. They can't win debates, so they just pretend the opposition doesn't exist.

I think a lot of the bias here is because universities are extremely biased, and the main theme of this thinker list is they are acceptable to universities as important prestigious authority figures. People go to university and the university tells them which 20 people to read, and they read that and think they have a broad education, and never read the type of people who are at odds with the university's point of view, like Ayn Rand.

By the way, I grew up left wing. I changed my mind.

(I am using the word "liberal" with its proper meaning, not the modern American meaning where it means left-wing anti-liberals.)

I agree there are many unsolved philosophy problems (Rand would agree with that too). But I do think some problems have been solved, and that a lot of people deny this because they don't understand the solutions offered by Rand, Popper, and a few other particularly effective philosophers.

I think if people get tired of dealing with the same ideas over and over, they should write canonical essays which address them, then in the future deal with people by providing links. There are rational ways to keep the possibility of advancing the discussion, without doing repetitive boring tasks and getting frustrated. I discuss this in my Paths Forward essay.
This leads to both sides dismissing the other which I think is a bad thing and prevents possible learning or at least productive discussion. But as I said, you seem to be at least extremely more read into your areas of interest than this stereotype that I've depicted. Even if I tend to agree with the majority on the philosophy subreddits about criticism towards objectivism and some other ideas, I respect the amount of effort you have obviously put into developing these positions for yourself, and I think these kinds of discussions can always be a good thing. So I'll just move into some thoughts I had about some of the things I've read and you can feel free to (or not to) respond to any areas I bring up.
OK. BTW, Rand has a lot of ideas, she was a really broad thinker who covered a ton of ground. Some of them get very little notice. I'd like for her critics to sometimes tell me what's wrong with her concept and criticism of secondhand living, instead of just complaining about selfish capitalism. Or tell me what's objectionable about her advocacy of the practical value of philosophy to human life. Or maybe even why she's wrong about atheism! There's so many interesting topics besides just getting mad that she's right wing.
BOI:
Upon reading the intro and skimming through a few other sections it is obviously a very well written book. The author has an excellent control of his prose (although it may be a little too "grand" for my tastes). But the book didn't ignite whatever compelling spark in me that it has to you and your community. The language was often awe-inspiring but I wonder if a lot of it's ideas held up to the promises of the language.
I don't like grand writing either. I think it's much plainer writing than most similar books, but there's room for improvement. It's noticeably nicer reading than Popper, who is worlds better than Kant to read. Rand is a better writer though, and plainer (but I try to write more plainly than that), though she does have a style which bothers some people.

I believe the ideas in The Beginning of Infinity do hold up, and are very important once studied and understood. Which I've done. And there's no critics who've done that. I guess I should also mention that some of us have had extensive discussions with DD and also he's written thousands of emails to FI group precursors. (There is a 20 year history, but it moved around a few times.) So we know more arguments than fit in the book.

In any case, the basic thing I ask of people is to point out a mistake in the book before giving up – and share that mistake incase there was a misunderstanding or a way the criticism is false. You write more below on several topics, so let's see:
Philosophy: Deutsh obviously has a very strong understanding of Popper and manages to explain his ideas very well. This was enjoyable because often when none-philosophers do philosophy, they either have a poor understanding of the philosophers they engage with or no knowledge and wind up repeating ideas that have already been done way before, missing out on the large body of work already present.
I don't know why you try to categorize people into philosophers and non-philosophers. Nor do I know how you're categorizing. DD is a philosopher. It's hard to imagine what more you could want than all the work he's put into philosophy, before you'd count him. Not that you know how much work he's put into being a philosopher. All you know, I guess, is that he doesn't have a university degree in philosophy. But that wouldn't have helped him understand Popper better anyway, and might well have gotten in the way. And I can tell you he's studied philosophy more than is required to get a university degree, and if you were assuming otherwise I don't think you should have.

In my informed judgment, DD understands Popperian epistemology about as well as Popper did. Better in some ways, worse in others. They're comparable. I think that alone is plenty to qualify him as a top philosopher, though DD also knows a lot of other philosophy (though Popper even more).
His arguments for Popper's ideas are clear and convincing although I'm not sure much convincing needs to be done at this day in age for falsifiability.
Popper has been very badly misunderstood, and many of his major ideas are being completely ignored by academia and most of the world. He is not at all popular, only some misunderstandings and a tiny fraction of what he said is well known.

For example (one of many), Popper solved the problem of induction – by rejecting it, accepting induction as impossible, and proposing a different way to approach epistemology. These philosophers who learned a little about falsifiability are inductivists who absolutely reject Popper's way of thinking, usually with little idea of how it works.

So a huge amount more convincing is needed. Popper was very marginalized during his lifetime and nothing much has changed. Most secondary sources about his work are grossly inaccurate and misrepresent his views. And most introductory philosophy books and courses either omit Popper or only mention him very briefly without explaining much (and if they do say anything, it's often wrong). (I'm not guessing this – I know a Popperian who checked hundreds of university courses and books to find this out.)
When he later goes onto to argue against things like positivism and postmodernism, I don't know if he realizes that these kinds of things have already been critically dismissed by the large part of current academic philosophy. Nevertheless, the arguments provide another mostly-original approach to add to the pile. His whole aesthetics thing felt pretty unnecessary to me especially considering all the literature he is ignoring there, but I didn't hold this issue to be of any critical importance to the book anyway so no big deal.
Yes some specific things are already reasonably well known and common opinions, and DD knows that. They can still be worth mentioning some because of how they fit into the book's arguments and themes, and make it more self-contained. And also to provide a different perspective on how to refute them as you mention, that's definitely important too!
Dichotomies: He has a few dichotomies which I think would be more wise to re-evaluate as spectrums such as the dynamic vs. static cultures and the rational vs. anti-rational memes. Classifying everything as black or white is hard to do and almost always the incorrect approach.
Well, I await your arguments on these points. Things like rational and anti-rational memes have a logic to them for why they have to be that way. A mixed meme wouldn't be effective and wouldn't make sense – having majorly contradictory themes and methods is not the optimal way to outcompete other memes for replication.
The other areas I will go into will be much further out of my area of expertise than this so take my comments with a grain of salt. I don't know either how solid these classifications even are in the first place, but again, my reading time was limited.

Multiverse theory: I'm not a physicist. That being said, from what I've been able to gather from most of these theories it seems as if multiverse theories often lack any additional explanatory power over their opponents. And interestingly, these theories seem to be able to be classified as infalsifiable ones according Popper's own ideas which would seem to be a huge contradiction for Deutsch. But again, I'm not a physicist and these criticisms may be handled in this book or elsewhere.
I agree with DD on this, and know enough about it to debate it with physicists. I'd be happy to discuss if you want to go into details. If you want to really understand it though, I'd recommend reading both of DD's books first. Or at minimum, chapter 2 of The Fabric of Reality.
Beginning of Infinity: This proposal too seems to have a degree of infalsifiablility around it given that we can't ever really know if there isn't more to progress on. Additionally, for someone against induction, this whole idea of the beginning of infinity came off to be to be something more or less induced out of the patterns he explains in parts of his book. I'm sure I'm missing parts of the author's argument here and I would be interested to see if these criticisms have any merit. Additionally, this kind of idea of infinite progress has been theorized over and over by many different people (see: singularity, although there are many different forms of it) and this just seems to be another, although I will grant that it seems to be a little more creative and rigorous than the ones currently out there.
Falsifiability is a Popperian criterion for whether an idea is scientific. Being unfalsifiable is not a criticism of an idea that was trying to be philosophy, not science.

A broader concept is criticizability. Can the idea be criticized? Could it lose an argument? If so, then it's fine as philosophy. Being able to be criticized with scientific tests or other empirical observations is helpful, but ultimately it's just a special case of criticism (and actually as DD explains in FoR, even most scientific ideas are rejected by non-empirical criticism).

I agree that others have had some somewhat similar ideas. I don't see that as a big deal or a problem. There are, I think you agree, differences in what DD says to make it notable and not just a repetition.

One of DD's arguments is to think about what makes things impossible? Laws of physics. What law of physics makes progress beyond a particular point impossible? And if there was one, why that point?
Good explanations: This whole idea just seems a little broad and already intuitive. Of course finding good explanations for things allows us to progress in the areas better explained. Progress leaves us better off, that's the definition of progress. So of course we pursue progress/better explanations because we like to be in a better situation over a worse one. Additionally I would be hesitant to list any single cause for the enlightenment, even if that cause happens to be one as broad as "good explanations" although the approach is certainly a novel and interesting one.
While good explanations seem like common sense, basically no one believes this, or at least they don't act like it. They keep doing explanationless correlation science, for example. Most "scientists" get this completely wrong and waste their careers, today. This is discussed in BoI chapter 12.

It's like trying to advocate for education or rational discussion. Everyone says they already agree and then doesn't listen. Then they do it in ways I consider mistaken. Trying to communicate about issues where people think they already agree, but there's major differences, can be tough. Especially when you just skimmed – I think some of this comes across better when reading the full book.
Overall Impression: He's a great writer and certainly one capable of inspiring others. He is a strong thinker with the ability to apply many solid ideas in creative ways. But that seemed to be kind of it. His "unifying theory" seems to only sort of connect the major issues he goes into and kind of comes off as rambling sometimes. That said, I loved his optimism for the future and even if I don't agree or believe in all of his ideas, I respect and appreciate that kind of progressive outlook.
My main concern is the book has arguments and explanations on dozens of specific topics, many of which I think are valuable. While the book has some ongoing themes and they are important, if you just read it as a collection of separate essays without fully understanding the connections (which is to be expected at first, philosophy is hard), it'd still have high value. Two such topics relevant to this discussion are universality and ape behavior.
Fallible Ideas:
Both space and time are getting a little sort for me here so I may find myself rushing again. I'm unfamiliar with Yahoo groups and so the structure is currently harder for me to navigate and read (one of the reasons why I didn't want to post to the group). But other than that it is an interesting group. I know you yourself seem to have ideas in libertarianism, anarchism, capitalism, atheism, objectivism, Karl Popper's ideas, and possibly some support for futurology (please correct me if I'm wrong, it isn't meant to be offensive). The group seems to be mostly linked to the objectivism and Karl Popper. As you are probably aware, this is not my area of interest but I also don't have anything against it. The one thing I noticed which I hoped was just a mistake on my end was that there seemed to be some favor in shaming others on the group which I found disagreeable. Particularly here and here
You are welcome to post about topics of interest to you, and only read posts about those topics, at the Fallible Ideas (FI) discussion group.

When something looks like shaming, or otherwise mean, it's important to remember that you don't have all the context. For the Alan post, I've known him for over a decade. He doesn't feel shame due to an email criticizing his public online writing/behavior, he appreciates criticism. Alan also would have said something if he'd thought I made a mistake. In the other post, I criticize Frank J. The context there includes that Frank J is not an FI member, so he won't see this. He is a long time public figure, by choice. I and some other FI members have mostly liked his writing for a long time. Further, I didn't explain my criticism (relating to how many children to have) very much because regular readers already know what it is, and anyone who doesn't is welcome to ask. The purpose of the post was to point out an example related to a philosophical point already agreed on, and to express sadness regarding the state of the world and the way children are treated.

Another thing I'd point out is I personally write the majority of posts which could be considered offensive. So you aren't going to participate at the group and be like, "I liked that curi guy, but everyone else here is a jerk." More the opposite.

There are reasons I write as I do, and others do some as well. Some things do violate conventional norms, politeness, and some people's expectations. Some things are Objectivist, some aren't. In each case, I'm open to discussing the matter. One general attitude at FI is that criticism is a valuable gift. Criticism is key to learning and improving, and highly desirable (and watering it down to be "nice" gets in the way of learning for rational people).
Now although my beliefs differ greatly from those on your community I would be happy in the near future to have a discussion some time. I would be open to having a ground up discussion of objectivism especially from a morals/ethics point of view in which I could argue back and forth in a manner like we have been doing here. As long as it remains civil which I'm sure will be the case. If you think your community would have some interest in this shoot me a PM and we can figure out a date or time or something to start it off.
Yes that'd be great. Just post to FI whenever you want. Please note, FI discussions are asynchronous: you post on your schedule, other people will post on theirs. Sometimes there may be delays. Also the main other thing to note to get started is the email formatting guidelines – in particular use plain text and do quoting similar to how you wrote part 1 on reddit, rather than top posting. A difference from reddit is FI emails are expected to be self-contained (leave enough nested quoting for context so it makes sense).

Note FI is very open to a wide variety of topics, and if in doubt about something just ask.
I promise the final part will be very short
I don't really mind length. Which reminds me: sometimes FI posts are quite long. If this is a problem for you, there are a couple things you can do about it. One is to reply multiple times separately, about different topics, to split it into several smaller and more manageable discussions. Another is to only reply about a specific point. Another is to ask people to write less (though they may very well reply that they enjoy writing it, and you can just not read/reply to parts you don't want to, and maybe someone else will be interested in that part).

Also you can reply to a three month old post. You can take your time and go at your own pace. There is no expectation that you keep up, or that you continue discussions promptly. We don't devalue ideas because they were written last year. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons for writing self-contained posts!)
Anyway there are a few suggestions/recomendations I would like to make for you if you don't mind. I don't wish for them to come off as insulting and they may not apply to you but they were just some thoughts/questions I had.
OK. FYI you can't offend me. I'm not sensitive. (This is one reason I sometimes offend people, because I don't spend my time thinking about some of those kinds of issues.)
Burden of Proof: I'm sure you're aware that many of the positions you hold are minority ones in the current philosophical climate.
Yes, I'm aware.
What that will often mean is that you will find yourself making the challenging claim to the current state of affairs. This will usually place the burden of proof upon you. I think this may be another reason the community has been harsh. This means that instead of asking for others for criticisms against your ideas, it will be more effective for you to lead with criticisms of their ideas or with actual proofs to the claims you make. This may help you find a generally better reception here and be seen as someone more open to discussion.
"Burden of proof" is a concept I disagree with in general. I won't get into that now, but there's a specific problem I see here. The "mainstream position" frequently consists of 20 different versions of something with significant differences. If I pick one and argue with it, people say they didn't have that version in mind. It can be necessary to nail them down on what specific stuff they believe before arguing with it. So there's an important reason for people advocating standard views to still state their view, or link a particular statement of it which they take personal responsibility for.

This often comes up with academic papers in particular. Sometimes I just pick a typical one and point out errors. Then people say, "Well, not every paper is perfect, but there's so many other papers reaching the same conclusions." Then, maybe they pick one, and I criticize it too, and then they stop speaking to me. Other times I ask people to pick a paper first, and claim it doesn't have errors (not just like a typo, but errors which ruin the main conclusions), and the majority of the time they refuse to do it. So things can be difficult however you approach it.

In any case, if you want someone to go first on something, just ask. One part of my approach to discussions, which I think should be more popular, is more back-and-forth. It's fine to write a short reply merely indicating you think the other guy should go first on some point. And then he can do so, or ask why, or argue why not, or whatever. And you can go from there. No big deal. Often I say something and don't preemptively include my full reasoning because I don't know if it's wanted, I don't know if the guy disagrees or not, and I say a lot of things and giving full reasoning for all of them would be very long. What I expect people to do is ask for more info about parts they disagree with, ask for more details if they are interested in a part where I didn't preemptively give a lot of detail, etc. I always have more ideas behind what I write, and I can't write them all, but I can add more in the particular areas people ask about.

I think going back and forth a lot in small chunks can help with the sort of issues you were concerned with. And can help with clarifying statements and dealing with misunderstandings. (I know this post is very long, but on each individual topic it's actually small chunks. You're welcome to split it up when replying however. I haven't split it because there wasn't any particular issue I thought I needed a reply about before replying to some other part.)
Studying Philosophy Independently: I get the sense that much of your philosophical learning has been done on your own/outside the classroom. In one way, this is an extremely admirable thing because of the difficulty. And in another way this difficulty can make it challenging to be correct all the time. There was a post a little while ago that I think does a great job handling this: here
Note how I posted in that thread and was ignored. That's typical. It's very hard to get people to join FI (even people who like me and/or are willing to have a discussion with me). And it's very hard to get people to give/discuss reasons why not with any seriousness or depth. If you have any ideas about this, let me know! My latest attempted solution is I wrote Paths Forward and keep linking people to it, but basically no one will read it and discuss. (One thing I've noticed is people treat links completely differently than fresh content, which makes it hard to talk to them because I don't want to rewrite the same ideas over and over. And I don't even really want to copy/paste stuff and lose formatting just for the sake of manipulating them.)

It's very very very very very challenging to be correct all the time no matter what you do.

You didn't link to a specific comment so it's hard to tell which ideas from the reddit discussion you liked. One thing I would point out is that many academics are not famous, and are accessible by email. For example, I had a question about William Godwin, and I was able to email and ask the scholar (Mark Philp) who made the 7 volume set of Godwin works, and he contacted another scholar about the matter and I got a good answer. I was able to have extensive discussion with Thomas Szasz, one of the best recent thinkers, until his death, simply by emailing him intelligently. There is no university professor today I'd prefer to have discussions with rather than Szasz. Another example is that in the past, DD was readily available on IRC – and he's always answered some email. And before email, people like Ayn Rand and Richard Feynman answered some letters from the public.

Of the people who are inaccessible, one should consider: why are they less accessible? Why aren't they open to discussion? Where are their Paths Forward? Are they judging ideas by the source rather than content? They might not be very valuable to talk with anyway. And going to a university would only get you limited access to a few of them. And if you disagree with your professors, because you like Ayn Rand and they don't, you might not get much at all – and it may well be the same with the other students who need perspectives similar to their teachers to get good grades (and btw you might get bad grades for disagreeing about some ideas).

Anyway, learning and getting things right is extremely hard no matter what, academia is overrated, the current design of schools is irrational (a big topic, I know!), and I don't know what your specific point was.

One other thing is I wanted to comment on something said in that thread:
I had a unit called Love and Friendship (it sounds ridiculous, but it was one of the best classes i'd taken) and this guy who is pretty much insane had to do a presentation on Kant's theory of love, or something along those lines, and he started by drawing a map of Australia on the whiteboard. (I live in Aus, but that doesn't make this any less weird), nothing else needs to be said about that guy. We also had a guy legit rage quit because he went on a big rant about how Descartes is wrong and not useful anymore and the lecturer was a huge scholar on Descartes just shut him down hard, guy almost cried I swear.
A teacher making a student almost cry is NOT OK, and not what education should be like. Reddit doesn't seem to mind though. People are so mean. He was wrong, so he should be punished? How is that education? Why not calmly and kindly explain a few points to him? This kind of misguided and cruel attitude to education is common among both students and teachers.

Having mean attitudes to people who present some material you already know (like a map of Australia) is also cruel and a bad attitude. It reminds me of when people made fun of Richard Feynman for going to the library to look up a "map of the cat", and then also complained when he presented information they had already memorized.
I'd like to add one additional thing to the sentiments there. It's not just about being around people that have similar interests to you, but also about the people that have different interests to you. A community of all like-thinkers will have a much slower time being exposed to new ideas to progress, and it will have a near impossible chance at accepting any ideas that are so radically different from the ones the community currently has (no matter how correct/rational the new ideas are).
Yes, that is one reason FI has always welcomed dissent, I frequently invite people who disagree with me, and I frequently search out other communities. That is one reason I posted on reddit recently.
That is one of the main reasons I love the philosopy community on reddit because so many different view points can meet and discuss here.
I'd like it more if the moderator didn't ban me from /r/badphilosophy (no reason given) and threatened to ban me from /r/askphilosophy (no specific reason given, no quotes or examples given) unless I obey some rules he was unwilling to clarify/explain (though I received a PM from someone apparently familiar with the scene, who informed me the actual rule is don't be an Objectivist, which seems very plausible given events so far). The moderator was also used standard dishonest/irrational tactics in the discussion (first he said the problem is that I was having discussions at a place for asking questions, but when I asked about the where the line for too much discussion was, then he ignored that topic and started saying I needed to follow different rules, which he was also unwilling to explain or give any example of me violating). And he waited until he was already on the verge of banning me to speak to me for the first time.

The same moderator stated, "... I can't stand your incessant Randrage."

My intention is to ignore this – what else can I do besides leave? – but I won't be surprised if I'm banned soon.

Most moderated discussion places are like this if you ever say stuff they really strongly disagree with. (I do not moderate my discussion places.)

Even some places which may appear unmoderated are like this, such as Less Wrong. Your posts don't go into a moderation queue there (last I checked), so it might appear unmoderated. But they do sometimes censor Popperian ideas – arbitrarily, not according to any clear written policies. Their written moderation policies try to appear minimal and give a false impression of the actual policies (which go beyond the written ones, which themselves have huge limits, such as any discussion related to politics or PUA may be "suppressed" if any moderator wants to.) And basically the only reason the moderation is anything resembling limited is because they rely on downvotes to shut people up – and if you don't listen to that unargued social signal then people start getting mad and moderators may well start messing with you. So you have a choice between either being "voluntarily" suppressed by downvotes which try to pretend to be soft moderation, not hard moderation. Or if you don't go along with that soft suppression, then you can easily run into hard suppression. So really I'd view it as heavily moderated. I have examples I could dig up if someone is super interested and gives me a short statement of how it will be valuable to them and what they will learn.
The community obviously isn't perfect and niches obviously have their place as well, but I think holistic, inclusive meeting places are the best ones for sharing and debating ideas and one of the best places to learn.
But it's not holistic and inclusive. It has a certain portion of the spectrum of ideas, which stands out to me since I'm not on that portion and was met with great hostility from many people (not you). Another thing that didn't feel inclusive is being limited to 1 post per 10 minutes, across multiple subreddits. With no buffer: if I go to sleep and wake up eight hours later to 18 unread replies to me, and I post 1 reply, then it's a 10 minute wait to be allowed to answer the next one. This is especially inconvenient because reddit has fast paced discussion and people often stop talking to you after a limited amount of time passes.

Here is an example of how unbelievably cruel and cold they can be, rather than inclusive (note that on the reddit site, if you aren't logged in as me, my posts will show up as deleted, even though they predate what claims to be a last warning. And note that I was not told they were deleted – actually that was hidden from me, while I was lied to by saying I'd only been warned so far. And I have no idea what else was deleted, due to the very nasty policy of misleading me about what has been deleted.):

If you have the opportunity (if you haven't already) definitely take some university-level philosophy classes, in particular any upper level moral theories class. With good teachers and decent students, these kinds of classes are often full of some of the best group discussions and learning one can find. And it often provides a chance for many to explore the outcomes of a variety of moral systems. Additionally, if you are an objectivist, ethical egoism (which - in my opinion - includes objectivism as well), is usually the first theory discussed discussed in most classes. So you would be able to almost immediately engage in a topic that is very meaningful to you.
If there is any specific idea/argument you believe I don't know, you're welcome to point me where to find it in a book or video lecture. (Preferably a text format, those are easier to engage with, quote, go through at your own pace, etc.)
One last thing I forgot to add but wanted to because it applies to me too! I'm sure you're familiar with this concept but when reading philosophical texts, the favored method is to read it once charitably, meaning trying ones best to think like the author and convince oneself of the ideas presented before moving on. After that, one should read the text critically, looking for flaws in the arguing and trying to disprove the theory with examples and such. This does not mean attacking the weakest arguments or making them to be weaker (straw man) but instead challenging oneself to go after the strongest ideas.
Improving your opponent's ideas and addressing the strongest challenges is something Popper emphasizes.

But there is a difficulty I'd like to point out. If you clean up someone's argument, and then reply to that version, often they won't recognize it, and will accuse you of replying to a straw man! They may disagree with your improvements. I've found with a lot of people, I have to stick rather closely to what they said, or they won't get it.

Another issue is if you don't give criticism of the weaker version as written, then the person doesn't get to find out about those weaknesses. Pointing those out can help them.

You can try to explain to people why the current version isn't very good, and how to improve it, and walk them through the process and all the concepts you're bringing in to make the improvements. But that can be a big project, and they may disagree with a lot of it. So often you're kinda stuck replying to what they know and think now, if you want to talk with someone. But you still should consider what you see as the best version in your own mind, and discuss it with other people who understand.
I talk about this because it is something most people need help practicing this, myself included. And I think my need for practice showed in what is probably an overly critical and simplified analysis of BOI. I still believe many of those points have merit, but I should have definitely put more work into both understanding and strengthening Deutsch position before making those attacks.
I have no objection to your initial criticisms of BoI as long as you understand and keep in mind the context, e.g. that you hadn't read the whole book and some issue might be answered in a part you didn't read. I think it's good to start discussing things early, so you can clear up misunderstandings quick rather than reading the whole book and building a web of misunderstandings. And what if it's a bad book? Being able to read a little and start a discussion protects you from having to read entire books to judge at all. If you read chapter 1 of a book and it seems to suck, I don't think you should either be silent or read all the other chapters. Talking to someone who's read more can clear a few things up and help you find out if you're missing anything or the book really does suck.

I think it's important to keep in mind context in a huge amount of ways, and keeping in mind the context of how much you know about something and gaps in your knowledge is an important example. But with that said, replying even to simply the very first thing you disagree with (and stopping there for now) can be reasonable and an efficient time management technique.

(BTW, due to the comment length limit on reddit, this would have had to split into 7 comments. I think that's a very bad feature of reddit.)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Anti-Capitalist Psychology

So there I was watching Apple's presumably-well-paid rich charity icon, Christy Turlington, come on stage and do a bad job of repeating a bad script. While wearing high heels after all that talk about running marathons. Maybe it impressed the target audience. I certainly wasn't the only one who thought it was terrible. A sample:
Apple has reached the "forced fake Q&A with celebrities" portion of its keynote lifecycle.
Tim Cook previously did a cringeworthy skit with Bono, on stage, about that free album giveaway. I guess two times makes a pattern :(

But the purpose of this post isn't to complain about Christy's staged appearance. I had a more interesting thought about it.

Christy has high social status. Many people admire her. They consider her to be "giving back". She's an ideal. They want to live more like her, and they wish everyone else would too. If only more people were like Christy, the world would be a better place.

Except, no. She flies to Africa to go for a run. If everyone did that, the world would be broke in no time. She's only able to do that because other people produce wealth to pay for her lifestyle. Which they do because they like having her as a feel-good symbol, a conversation piece, a pretty girl they have an excuse to look at, a person who spends time learning to give certain types of speeches and getting attention for them, and so on. But not everyone can be a feel-good symbol, with no one to support them. Not everyone can live a rich elite lifestyle involving plane flights, but without helping produce any planes. Until we get much much better robotics technology, someone else has produce the things Christy consumes.

Fundamentally, it's specialization and division of labor, with Christy doing a particular type of labor that's basically in the entertainment category.

My thought is that lefties mix up "giving back" and actual production. They mix up high social status with contributing to society in material ways. They think giving back is production – or even better. This helps explain how they think their fantasy utopias, where everyone lives like Christy, could work. Because they think if everyone would just give back and help raise awareness and so on, instead of being greedy, we'd all be richer and could all just spend our time flying to Africa with a camera crew.

Christy is a symbol and entertainer. Certain misguided people like to see someone living a particular lifestyle, so they pool their money and a lucky winner lives it and the rest follow along on social media, TV, or whatever she uses. This does not constitute giving back or creating more than she consumes. Quite the opposite. People give her wealth because they enjoy seeing her consume it in this way. That's not an ideal, it's not doing good, it's just a fantasy game. It's their right to play it, but if it's part of their mental model that society could and should be full of people like Christy, they are deeply mistaken.

Somehow the left manages to see Christy consuming a large amount of wealth produced by others – a consumption focused lifestyle – as "giving back" and an ideal. I think that's deeply revealing about their economic misconceptions.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)