If you aren't anything, you can't be accused of anything.

I just saw someone making an argument that something is unbiased because no one tried to bias it or designed it to be biased.

In other words, he thinks that not being biased is the automatic default.

I think this is what many inductivists think: that all the theories they make up and claim to have induced are not just bias talking. And why do they think it's not bias but rather a hint coming from the evidence itself? Because it can't be bias because they didn't intend any bias or do it on purpose. Simple as that.

But actually epistemology/reality is the other way around: everything is biased by default (a lot, not a little), and it is only with great care and effort that we can get anything that isn't biased.

It's as Feynman said: it's easy to fool ourselves, and science is what we've learned about how to not fool ourselves. Or in other words, bias is the default and the scientific method consists of doing everything we know how to in order to reduce bias.

You can tell there is a lot of bias to overcome because of how careful scientists have to be to get good results. It's not that the scientists are bad people or anything like that, it's simply that avoiding bias takes skill and effort not just a lack of bad intentions.

David Deutsch says about this (quoted with permission):

It's the intentional fallacy. If something is bad, a bad person must have done it. If something is biased, a biased person must have done it. And therefore if we are all pure and unbiased, we are infallible.

That reminds me of *early* induction. According to Popper (with textual evidence and good arguments), Bacon's conception of induction was a bit different than what you usually run into today. The main idea was to *purge your mind of bias*[1]. Then you can read nature like an open book and make zero mistakes and finish learning all of science in a few years.

This is (again via Popper) building on the *original* meaning of induction which comes from Aristotle (who falsely attributed it to Socrates) which was about maieutics. The idea is, very roughly, that the truth is trivial (and already inside us, I think) and the only obstacle to the truth is therefore bias.

[1] How do you know what is a bias and what isn't? Easy. It's all bias. Just empty your mind completely. That's Bacon's way.

Socialism is (from dictionary):

a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

One of the means of production is knowledge contained in people's minds. If the community owns or regulates people's minds that is an especially harsh form of slavery.

http://mises.org/econcalc.asp

Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
by Ludwig von Mises (1920)

In this essay Mises criticizes socialism (in short socialism is impossible because it does not provide means for rational economic calculation and decision making). In doing so, he has to talk about what socialism says. He makes a good attempt to give a fair and reasonable interpretation. One of the things he says is socialism differentiates between consumption goods and the means of production. If a socialist citizen wishes to trade his allotment of beer for his friend's allotment of concert tickets, that's allowed. But there can be no trade of the means of production because they are communally owned.

That makes sense because otherwise the planners have to know everyone's tastes so they know who to give beer to and who to give concert tickets to. (Or they can try a rather implausible scheme such as making everythign free for the taking and asking people to only take modestly.)

There is a problem here: this distinction rests on a naive and false conception of the kinds of goods that exist. It assumes household cleaners are for consuming and hammers are for producing and every good is is one type or the other. This is false. Consider the Macbook. This is a consumer product which people use to play games, but it's also a means of production for programmers, video game artists, people who need a spreedsheet program to manage a warehouse or factory, architects, and sales people who need to create presentations.

Even household cleaners can be used in production (to make drugs, for example) and hammers can certainly be used for either hobby work or professional work. Jewelry can be melted into gold or silver which can be used in production. Factories can be remodeled into living spaces. There can be no distinction between consumer and productive goods.

This is not Mises' problem. It is socialism's problem. If socialism wishes the factors of production to be communally owned, but for consumption goods to be privately owned, then it's socialism's problem to (impossibly) draw a distinction between the two.

My conclusion is that socialists have a choice:

1) Socialism is impossible.

2) Socialism must intrude into its citizens' entire lives: everything is communally owned and its use determined by the planners.

3) Socialism must make arbitrary declarations about which goods are to be communally owned and which not. Doing that will cause economic harm by preventing goods from switching categories even when doing so is efficient.

Do you like to learn things? Critical discussion is the best way. Join these email lists and post in comments if you know any other great ones:

Taking Children Seriously
Autonomy Respecting Relationships
Fabric of Reality
Rational Politics

EDIT: These are all superseded by the Fallible Ideas list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fallible-ideas/

What makes profit emerge is the fact that the entrepreneur who judges the future prices of the products more correctly than other people do buys some or all of the factors of production at prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too low. Thus the total costs of production — including interest on the capital invested — lag behind the prices which the entrepreneur receives for the product. This difference is entrepreneurial profit.

By Ludwig von Mises in Profit and Loss, p 8

I am making freely available the History of Greece by William Godwin as a PDF. This is a very rare book which could not be found online until today. Enjoy. There's a high resolution version too.

I wrote a guide to the iOS game Infinity Blade:

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=755093