Automizing

Objectivism discusses automizing the use of your ideas. For example, you automized walking. You can walk without consciously thinking about it. Walking works automatically. Walking is actually pretty complex and involves moving multiple muscles and balancing, but you can do all that automatically. Pretty cool!

Some people think automizing sounds mindless and are wary of it. What if I automate how I handle a situation and then I keep doing the same actions over and over without thinking? How do you automatize anything without losing control over your life?

Let's step back. There's a simple concept here. You do some stuff and the first time it takes time, effort, attention, work. But if you do it often, you learn how to do it easier. This frees up effort for other stuff. Learning better ways to do things, that consume less resources, isn't bad. That isn't losing control over your life.

You need to make good choices about what to use when. If you have a method of doing something without thinking about it consciously, that's a good tool. You can still choose when to use this method, or not. If you know how to clean your house without thinking about it (letting you focus on listening to audiobooks), that doesn't make you clean your house. You still get to control your life and choose if and when to clean.

People's methods of doing something – automatic or not – can be used as building blocks. You use the walking method while doing cleaning. The cleaning method involves doing multiple simpler methods together. (If you're a programmer, think of these as functions. You can build a cleaning function out of a walking function, a looking around function, an identifying dirt from visual data function, and so on. You would not want to write a cleaning function only in terms of basic actions like moving individual muscles.)

People build up many layers of complexity. They automate things like a life schedule, and routine cleaning, and routine cooking and eating for mealtimes, and so on. Those automizations threaten their control over their life. They get so set in their ways, they have trouble choosing whether to keep doing that. The problem here isn't automization itself. It's having a bland repetitive life and basically habitually not thinking. That's a totally different sort of thing than creating building block methods – like walking, or cleaning – to use in your life or in other methods. And figuring out how to do them better, faster, easier.


Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Pragmatism

A lot of pragmatism is because people lose arguments but still disagree. They don't know how to deny the truth of an idea, but they still don't want to do it.

There is a gap between the knowledge they live by and the knowledge they use in debates. The knowledge applied to debates is what they call ivory tower abstractions, and the knowledge applied to life they call pragmatic.

This gap is a very very bad thing.

This separation results in lots of bad intellectual ideas that contradict reality. And lots of bad life choices that contradict principles and logic, e.g. by being superstitious.

Being able to speak intelligently about your life knowledge allows for getting advice and learning from criticism. Being able to apply abstract knowledge to life allows for using the scientific method, free trade, or successfully finding a book in a Dewey Decimal organized library.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (7)

Watching The World Burn

While watching men burn the world, sometimes i wonder why they do that and if there's some way to persuade them to change. I wrote a dialog about it:

curi: doesn't that hurt?
Mark: what?
curi: the fire
Mark: what fire?
curi: you're burning off your legs
Mark: no i'm not
curi: you can't walk anymore
Mark: sure i can
curi: then walk 10 feet, show me
Mark: later, i'm tired
curi: [astonished] you lie so much!
Mark: why are you so mean and critical and negative?
curi: such a better life is possible. you could walk and produce instead of putting all your effort into destroying yourself and your children
Mark: i'm happy, my life is pretty great, go bother someone else
curi: you burned off your legs!
Mark: so what? it's a sexy new look
curi: that's not a pretty great life. that's not happiness
Mark: i think i know more about my feelings than you do
curi: can i help? would you like some medicine?
Mark: no
curi: why not?
Mark: i have my own vision and goals. go live your own life and stop trying to control me. and what do you have against fire or pain anyway? my kids LOVE them, which proves how rational fire and pain are, since kids are born without all the hangups adults like you have.
curi: would you be willing to read a book and reconsider?
Mark: [doesn't reply]

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (5)

Ann Coulter's Bad Scholarship

Ann Coulter tweeted:

Professor whose statistical model predicted every election since 1912: Odds Of President Trump Range Btwn 97% & 99%-http://bit.ly/1p63RMW

After my previous positive reviews of her book scholarship, I wanted to highlight how atrocious this is. Let's look over the article:

Political Science Professor: Odds Of President Trump Range BETWEEN 97% AND 99%

The model has been correct for every election since 1912 except for the 1960 election

Ann said "every election". Did she even read the article? What a travesty.

Specifically, Norpoth predicts that Trump has a 97 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton and a 99 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders.

The predictions assume Trump will actually become the 2016 presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

So it doesn't predict either primary. It only predicts Trump is 97-99% to become president if you throw in the big assumption that he's literally 100% likely to win the Republican primary.

So that's two major factual errors in Ann's tweet.

Besides getting the basic facts wrong, twice, there's also the issue that the article and prediction model are utter crap.

“When I started out with this kind of display a few months ago, I thought it was sort of a joke,” the professor told the alumni audience

You know what would have been impressive? If the prediction model was published in 1911.

Instead it was worked out a few months ago and has never actually predicted anything? It's really easy to "predict" past data. It's called back-fitting and it's well known. Making a formula to fit past data is completely different than making successful predictions about the future.

(That it was back-fitting, not prediction, was predictable to me before I even clicked the article. Ann should have known better even if she literally didn't read a single word of the article.)

Norpoth, a 1974 University of Michigan Ph.D. recipient who specializes in electoral behavior alignment, said his crystal ball also shows a 61-percent chance that the Republican nominee — Trump or not — will win the 2016 presidential election.

Wait what? This is pretty incoherent. These numbers do not make sense. For this math to add up – around 98% chance for Trump to win if he's the nominee, and 61% chance for any Republican to win – requires Trump to have only around a 60% chance to be the nominee (if the other Republican candidates are somehow all around 0% likely to win the general election) or less.

I also checked out the Daily Caller's source:

Political science professor forecasts Trump as general election winner

“You think ‘This is crazy. How can anything come up with something like that?’ ” Norpoth said “But that’s exactly the kind of equation I used to predict Bill Clinton winning in ‘96, that I used to predict that George Bush would win in 2004, and, as you remember four years ago, that Obama would win in 2012.”

Note the wording, "the kind of equation". So he made up a new equation just now. He's made up other equations in the past. He keeps changing them each time, rather than re-using an equation that's ever predicted anything.

In contrast, Norpoth forecasted that a hypothetical presidential race with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio on the Republican ticket would be a much closer race. The results showed Clinton with a 55 percent chance of winning the race against Cruz or Rubio with a 0.3 percent lead in the popular vote.

So Trump needs to have a very low chance to win the GOP primary for the math to work out. Meanwhile the prediction model saying he'll win the general election is based on him doing so well in the primaries! This is all a bunch of contradictory nonsense.


And Ann Coulter is promoting this utter nonsense on Twitter while making factual errors. This fits her recent pattern of saying anything – even stupid and dishonest things – that are on Trump's side. :(


Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (2)

Popper and Brainstorming

I got a Critical Rationalism (CR, aka Popperian Epistemology) question today about how conjecturing/brainstorming/guessing works. I'd already given an initial answer that people already know how to brainstorm, so what's the problem? But there was further concern about a missing piece in CR.

I've seen questions like this before. They involve a misunderstanding of epistemology. People are looking for theory of epistemology to be a standalone complete framework, rather than a collection of useful knowledge.

CR takes human knowledge and adds and subtracts some things. It does not replace all existing knowledge from the ground up.

This is really important. I've seen a lot of questions about CR and *stuff people already know how to do*. And questions about CR not being totally complete instructions for every detail of how to do things.

It's not supposed to replace your life. It's supposed to augment your life.

CR doesn't teach you how to type. You already know how to type. But not perfectly. No one here is a perfect typist. And I'll bet some people here actually make frequent typing errors, press some keys with the wrong fingers, need to look at their keyboard sometimes while typing, etc

Nevertheless, CR leaves your typing skill alone. It doesn't offer a new and better way to type. Your typing may be imperfect, but CR isn't trying to help with it and make it better. (At least not in any direct way. Indirectly CR helps with everything.)

You already know English. Your grasp of English has various flaws. Nevertheless, CR largely leaves it alone. CR does not try to replace your knowledge of English with a better understanding.

CR builds on top of pre-existing flawed knowledge you have – like typing and English.

In the case of English, CR does give a few tips, changes, and improvements. E.g. CR offers some clarifications on the meanings of "science", "justified true belief", "positivism", "induction", "authority", "rational" and "knowledge".

With brainstorming or other guessing/conjecturing, it's a pre-existing skill you already had before you'd ever heard of CR. Like English and typing. (For most people).

CR does offer some tips, changes, and improvements for how to brainstorm. But CR does not offer a from-the-ground-up replacement. Why would it? Your ability to brainstorm ideas, while imperfect, does basically work. Yes people get stuck in some ways (and a lot of the tips, both from CR and other places are directed at that). But the big picture is you can think and don't need that to be replaced anymore than you need a replacement for your knowledge of English.

Take what you already have and improve it and solve problems with it. But just look for reforms, not a fully-formed complete replacement.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Abortion and Planned Parenthood

In US politics, pro-life people hate Planned Parenthood, and pro-choice people defend it.

Last night in the GOP primary debate, Donald Trump (who now claims to be pro-life, despite past statements that he's very pro-choice) got criticized for his support of Planned Parenthood. After calling Ted Cruz a liar, Trump bizarrely continued by saying that Planned Parenthood does wonderful things, thus freshly demonstrating that Cruz is right.

I've heard a lot of right-wing atheists, like many libertarians, complain about Republican opposition to abortion. It's a big sticking point that lures them leftward. What I don't hear them talk about as much is that Planned Parenthood should not receive taxpayer funding; that violates the proper role of government and taxes. But what I really don't see them saying is that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization.

Contrary to the typical dynamics, I'm pro-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood.


Planned Parenthood is not just a "neutral organization that provides abortions and other health services", as many people seem to imagine (without having done any research). It's a radical (and powerful) leftist institution which actively promotes evil agendas.

Planned Parenthood was founded by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger. Why? Because she disliked human beings. She liked abortion because she wanted fewer black, poor and stupid people to exist. She wanted to control and limit the human population and get rid of the types of people she considered undesirable. She also advocated sterilizing people and contraceptives. Abortion was one more tactic designed to promote the agenda of population control and race purification.

(This stuff is not controversial or seriously disputed. Research it if you're curious.)


The "pro-choice" position is disgusting. The issue is: is abortion murder? To reply to that with "it's a woman's choice" is absolutely stunning. Everyone should find this shocking and appalling.

The only defensible pro-abortion answer could be, "No, abortion is not murder."

I don't want to debate all the details and get into exactly where the line should be, but I will now tell you why I favor abortions in the first trimester:

I don't believe in God or the soul. I consider that mysticism. I look at the issue scientifically.

For murder to take place, there must be a human being which is murdered. I don't think a sperm or egg is a human being. And nor do I think an embryo is a human being.

What would it take for me to believe there is a human being capable of being murdered? At minimum, it would have to have a brain which has some electrical activity. Without the physical existence of a brain, which is doing something, there cannot be a human mind. And without a mind, there's no person. No mind means no consciousness. No mind means no one there to have preferences, to think, to say "I", to want to live.


I've noticed a lot of Democrat politicians say they are "personally against abortion", but want it to be legal. They also say they'd like abortion to be "safe, legal and rare". My question is: why?

If abortion isn't murder, then why are you personally against it? If abortion isn't murder, why do you want it to be rare?

What claims are there about abortion being bad, other than the issue of murder? What anti-abortion ideas do these people believe? In what non-murder way is abortion bad? They never explain and this has never made any sense.


The exceptions that even many pro-life people make to allow abortion are weird. Suppose that human life begins at conception and abortion is murder:

If abortion is murder, why should being raped make murder acceptable? Why should incest justify murder? If that's a human being in the womb, it doesn't matter how it got there, and how unwanted it may be, it's absolutely not OK to murder it.

The life of the mother exception is the only one that makes any sense. If the mother's life is in danger, then you'd have a consideration (a human life) that could actually matter when discussing killing a human being in the womb.


Some pro-life people would ask me: "How confident are you in your science? Do you really want to risk it? What's so great about abortion to be worth the risk that it's murder? Why not just let this issue go?"

The answer is that abortion is important. Having a child is a huge change to the life of the mother and father. Parenting is a really big deal. It absolutely makes enough difference for the abortion issue to be worth exploring.

Not everyone wants to have a child. And people who do want one may want their child later. And that's good. People are right to decide if and when they should start a family. Making good decisions about that is a big deal. Parenthood should indeed be "planned"! It deserves thought, organization, and being with the right co-parent.

Abortion can enable choosing a different person to marry who you get along with better. It can enable finishing your education. It can enable having a savings and keeping your finances under control your whole life, rather than having a kid early and struggling with money for decades. These are a big deal.

Abortion helps prevent the unfortunate situation of a man paying child support and a stressed single mom trying to cope. That's not a good situation. It happens. Abortions let some people avoid that fate.

Abortions make a big positive difference in some people's lives.


You may ask: Why can't people just use contraceptives? Aren't the people getting abortions irresponsible?

Contraceptives are not 100% effective. But, yes, many people getting abortions are irresponsible. So what? If you want to work to teach people to think better, live more responsibly, etc, go right ahead. That'd be great. Not letting them get an abortion will not help them.

You may ask: Do some people use abortion as a backup plan to help enable a more promiscuous lifestyle? Does it contribute to cads and sluts having drunken parties, rather than doing something more worthwhile with their time?

Yes. But the potential misuse of a technology is no reason to ban it. Medical technology, like plaster casts to help heal broken bones, enable people to be more reckless in their lives, but it's still a good thing.

You may ask: Why can't they just be abstinent if they aren't prepared to be a parent?

It's a matter of freedom. Many people have different values than you. Some live sinfully. Some live pretty responsibly but do have pre-marital sex.

On the premise that abortion isn't murder, then: it's a technology which helps some people's lifestyles. Whether those lifestyles are good or bad, as long as it's non-violent, non-criminal, non-rights-violating, they deserve liberty and tolerance. If you've got some suggestions about how to live better, go ahead and persuade people, but do not use the government to ban technologies.


Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (11)

Stefan Molyneux is a Dishonest Hack

The Truth About Ted Cruz by Stefan Molyneux is a hit video that throws everything it can against Ted Cruz while pretty much ignoring all his merits.

It purports to be a well-sourced factual takedown relying mostly on quotes. Molyneux made a website for it with a detailed table of contents and a long list of sources with links.

One of the issues, "Texas Values", discusses the Michael Wayne Haley court case. Here's what Molyneux says:



And he has two sources for this:

The Brutalism of Ted Cruz from The New York Times, a leftist propaganda rag that hates Cruz, and which can't be trusted after getting caught in so many lies. And, second, David Brooks’ (Slightly) Unfair Attack on Ted Cruz which basically agrees with the first article.

When I google for "cruz prosecute haley" (without quotes), the articles Molyneux used come up first and sixth. What Molyneux ignored is the second google hit:

David Brooks’ Dirty Hit On Ted Cruz: How Pundits Lose Credibility

Both articles Molyneux links are light on details. But this one is a detailed scholarly refutation of the position Molynex repeated straight from the New York Times. Why did Molyneux ignore it?

Molyneux is offensively dishonest because he pretends to be a scholar. He didn't just make a video attacking Cruz. He put together a big list of sources in order to lie to people that he'd done a bunch of proper research. He hadn't. He just looked for one-sided ways to smear Cruz no matter how false they were. There's no excuse for missing the second google hit on the topic. (Which also comes up on the first page of google results for a variety of other search terms I tried.)

I also dislike the sneaky claim that Cruz was "just following orders". That is not something Cruz said, nor is it what the Cruz defender I linked at Ethics Alarms said. It's just Molyneux dishonestly trying to call Rob Garver a Cruz defender (the guy from his second source who wrote, "Yet it’s hard to argue with many of [Brooks'] conclusions."). Molyneux is pretending to give both sides of the issue, but he just attacks Cruz twice and attributes one of the attacks to Cruz defenders, while ignoring Cruz's actual defenders.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (7)

Trump's Pro-Amnesty CPAC Speeches

Donald Trump at CPAC 2013 (video) (transcript):

Now this is a hard one, because when it comes to immigration, you know that the 11 million illegals, even if given the right to vote. You know you're going to have to do what's right. But the fact is 11 million people will be voting Democratic. You can be out front, you can be the spearhead, you can do whatever you want to do, but every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic. It's just the way it works, and you have to be very, very careful, because you could say, that to a certain extent, the odds aren't looking so great right now for Republicans, that you're on a suicide mission. You're just not going to get those votes. [emphasis added]

What Trump said is:

Immigration is hard because the 11 million illegals are all going to vote Democratic after we give them the right to vote. And we "have to" give them the right to vote because that's "what's right". But we should be "careful" doing it because its' a "suicide mission" for Republicans. (But do it anyway.)

Why is it right to give illegal aliens the right to vote in America? Are we a country of laws, or not? This isn't just some kind of legal resident status (which would be bad enough), Trump is saying we have to give every illegal full citizenship including voting. No we don't have to do that! No that's not right!

I'm not surprised that Trump is a squishy leftist.

I already knew Trump was a protectionist with no clue about the free market. I already knew Trump praised Obama in 2009.

I already knew Trump favors eminent domain, doesn't like guns, is pro-choice, has New York values, sympathizes with social justice warriors, and isn't very religious. I knew Trump favors big government healthcare because he has a "heart". And Trump favored taking in Syrian refugees, and funding Planned Parenthood, before changing his position.

I already knew Trump doesn't want to cutback on Social Security and Medicare. His ridiculous entitlements plan (that he advocated at CPAC 2013 and 2014, not just on the campaign trail today) is no reforms or cutbacks, just grow the economy and don't worry about spending. Trump is not a small government kinda guy.

I already knew Trump had praised Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Al Sharpton. I already knew he was involved with some of the worst leftists. I already knew thinks he can make deals with the left as President, instead of standing up to the Washington Cartel.

I already knew that Trump was squishy as hell on Free Speech – when Muslim terrorists attacked a free speech event in Texas, Trump questioned why people say offensive things that "taunt" Islamofascists.

What surprises me is that Ann Coulter praised Trump's 2013 CPAC speech and cited it as evidence that Trump has a previous history of being good on immigration:

The assumption Ann's readers will make is that Trump is against suicide. Nope. Trump was demanding suicide!

He wasn't saying, "It's suicide, don't do it." He was saying, "It's suicide, so be 'careful' with it, but we 'have to' do it anyway because it's 'right'."

How can Ann take a speech where Trump advocates giving every illegal alien the right to vote in US elections – even though he thinks this will destroy the Republican party – and then tell us to support Trump (as a Republican!) because he's great on immigration? Why is Ann covering for Trump on the one issue she cares about?

Ann told us that Trump was the one guy joined her in opposing immigration in CPAC 2014.

But Trump said the same thing again:

When you let the 11 million — which will grow to 30 million people — in, I don't care who stands up, whether it's Marco Rubio, and talks about letting everybody in, you won't get one vote. Every one of those votes goes to the Democrats. You have to do what's right; it's not about the votes necessarily. But of those 11 million potential voters which will go to 30 million in a not too long future, you will not get any of those votes no matter what you do, no matter how nice you are, no matter how soft you are, no matter how many times you say 'rip down the fence and let everybody in' you're not going to get the votes. So with immigration, you better be smart and you better be tough, and they're taking your jobs, and you better be careful. You better be careful. [emphasis added]

This transcript isn't perfect. He actually said it twice in the video at 14:50: "Now with that you have to do what's right. You have to do what's right. It's not about the votes necessarily." Trump emphasized doing what's "right". Regardless of who they're going to vote for, you have to do the right thing. Let them vote even though it will be for Democrats. That means amnesty.


I support Ted Cruz who has wanted to build a wall since at least 2012. Cruz, besides being better than Trump on individual issue after issue, is smarter and more principled. Cruz favors free markets, limited government, and liberty in a way Donald Trump doesn't understand.


Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)