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I agree, in general, that the government can do certain things well. But to get back to the notion of freedom, even when the government can do certain things well and that increases access and options on the aggregate., its still not obvious to me that people are more free because of it. Consider Phi's complaint about advertisements: he claims that its a form of coercion on people, who don't know any better, to buy goods with a high cost to quality ratio. So imagine a freedom-loving gov't steps and, while they can't stop advertising (freedom of speech and all) they can set up some factories to make low cost, high quality goods. Ok, so the capital has to come from somewhere, and since they must be operating on thinner profit margins than private competitors, they decide to subsidize the program with tax dollars. Well, where does those tax dollars come from? From coercing people with money to part with [sometimes] a large fraction of that money. So while advertising is influencing people to make (arguably) poor choices regarding purchases, to fix the problem we must coerce other people, on threat of violence and imprisonment, to give up part of their wealth. So are people more or less free? Maybe since poor people have "more options" there's more 'freedom' in the aggregate. But, I'd argue that there's also more violence and coercive forces, which is less 'freeing' and private individuals now have less wealth to spend as freely as they might have otherwise. When the gov't spends money on public goods could this lead to more options and increase the general welfare? Possibly. But does this increase freedom? I'm not convinced that it does.

I see what you're saying, and I think your intentions are good. But, you're getting into a sticky area. At what point does influence (such as through advertising) turn into coercion? What kind of information results in better decision making? Some of the only advertisements I actually like are movie commercials: because I'll actually go see a movie based on a good preview. Now, am I less free because a movie producer has paid to get that ad on TV... am I more free because I have to look up previews for myself on youtube? The distinction is not so clear to me. Nor is it clear that there's "enslavement" going on. Taken to its logical conclusion, your statement implies that poor people without education are less capable of making independent decisions. But are educated, wealthy people doing any better? Wealthy people make purchase decisions all the time that have nothing to do with utility of purpose, often thanks to advertisement (expensive cars to signal wealth but don't confer any advantage for the purpose of driving). But if signaling is something people implicitly value, and advertisers are good at getting across the information that car x would be a successful signal, is the consumer any less free? The price you're willing to pay (even if you're only willing to pay it thanks to the effects of ads) may not have the best value... but you're using a selective, utilitarian, definition of value that people just don't really have (and there's plenty of cog psych research to back this up). You can blame gov't ineptitude or lack of education but the fact is that, from an outside, time-dependent, view, humans make seemingly bad decisions all the time. While there are probably things the gov't can do make life better (by one metric or another), I fail to see how they can make people freer by your definition - which seems to be to maximize the ability to make unencumbered decisions that lead to maximized value. But the problem is, people can never rid themselves of external, psychological influences because values are not passed down on high, but are obtained through widely different experiences that give people inconsistent values. So how could gov't possibly create a policy that would allow everyone's utility to be maximized when people's values are often contradictory? Either you have to leave people alone to make poor decisions with multitudinous, sometimes conflicting influences or you have to pick a narrow set of values to enforce and control all the inputs. Doesn't seem possible to me. I'm writing in stream here, so let me know if any of this is way off. and as a side note, I find this conversation intensely interesting.

This isn't really an Einsteinian innovation, truth be told. The empiricist philosophers have been thinking about this for a while (you might be especially interested in the writings of David Hume). If objective reality doesn't exist independently of our observation of it, then induction is impossible (or so the empiricists feared) - for how can you make inferences if there's no causality (to get causality you need, at least, consistency in some underlying reality). sure, but even philosophy can demand empiricism. If there is no objective reality and therefore no causality, why is it that two people can perform the same experiment and obtain the same result? That is an empirical question. You're thinking like an empiricist here. If objective reality doesn't exist, then supernatural and the metaphysical can (because these are effects without causes). There are two possibilities here: the empiricists are correct, the metaphysical can exist, in which case causality assumption is violated. Since science can only make inferences about consistent, underlying things with causal relationships, you cannot make scientific inferences about the metaphysical. OR, the empiricists are wrong, objective reality does exist, everything is ultimately causal and things labeled as metaphysical are simply things that a) science can not yet answer b/c we can't measure it yet b) don't exist at all except in the imagination of crackpots. disagree and see my arguments above. Scientific claims are necessarily empirical (which is why you can perform experiments).

My purpose wasn't to argue about the price of goods, but to contest a notion of freedom that has anything to do with the price and quality of privately manufactured goods. After all, if you feel that the quality and/or price of goods can be improved, you are perfectly free to innovate and market such a product. If a consumer chooses not to buy what you think is a superior quality, you could hardly accuse that person of somehow being less free. Right and we would all love the government to be worthy of that trust. But they're not. Its an institutional problem that is hard to fix because implementing a fix means reliance on those who are untrustworthy in the first place. I think I agree that having non-trustworthy politicians hurts freedom, but I'm not clear on what a realistic fix would be. Yes I think I misunderstoon, but I'm sure that wasn't your fault. I disagree that the issue is simple, but this might just be semantics. Good point. I actually don't know what it would take to have a useable private road system or even just a highway. I doubt its easy, with plenty of regulatory hurdles. But either way, the current, publicly funded system would make any serious private auto traffic contender financially infeasible, both in land availability (depending on the location) and price competition. Btw - I'm not trying to dump on public roads, which for the most part I think is a good idea, just that I'm not convinced it makes anyone 'more free'. indeed!

bacterial doesn't imply contagious, since not all bacteria are transmissible

Making a good more expensive doesn't make it higher quality. You are also free to design, commission and build your own higher quality product and spend as much money as you want on its development. You seem to be implying here that we SHOULD trust our government. Can you think of no good reason why it wouldn't be smart to hand over medical decisions to the same people who brought us the USA PATRIOT act? You can insist, and we all agree, that behaving cordially and respecting people in office are all worthwhile attitudes, and for the most part people holding political office are considered respected members of society. But, that doesn't change the fact that the incentives motivating politicians and lobbyists are not the same incentives that motivate regular folk. but even with "vigilance" the financial incentives for occlusion, rent seeking and outright corruption are pretty high. How do you effect change when the media doesn't even report on routine renk seeking (so commonplace its not newsworthy)? Sure thinks like wikileaks is evening things out, but even then only major stories attract much attention. once again you seem to be equating cheap things with general freedom. Are the people who could afford to drive on higher quality, private roads more or less free because they are restricted to gov't-funded roads? Are we more or less free because subsidizing roads decreases incentives to develop better mass transit? And what about Amtrak, a publicly funded transportation system that's neither cheap, high quality nor particularly 'freeing.' Economics 101 tells us that market is very good at finding these kinds of 'pareto optimal' solutions, but since private individuals are making private investments, losses due to investor error are not socialized. Specialization is not just a feature of socialist systems.

Klaynos - would you support the notion that all scientific models can be expressed mathematically? I'm inclined to agree but want to think of counterexamples

I think we might be talking past each other. I call the former observations, which when put into context of the experiment, can be used to build a predictive model (for future experiments). If knowledge isn't predictive, then what do you really know?

I was going to make a similar point. For small operations, there is computational overhead from just getting the numbers from memory and printing to the terminal, so it depends how you're counting system time. If the operation is very quick, probably you can't measure with enough precision to tell the difference. Definitely sweep through a range of sizes and see what happens.

I'm not a mathematician, but I'm assuming the question is universally confusing. Can you clarify? What do you mean by "point is not actually possible by the equation" and " for my data point I have 1,20 for the x,y substitution."?

well what is knowledge but an explanatory model?

I am an asshole and, clearly, only skimmed this thread before posting. My apologies. What I meant is that science consists of pitting maps against territories. No, we can't ever observe the territory directly, but by making independent, repeated observations and and performing experiments it increases our certainty that underlying reality is universal. Sure, you can quibble about details, instrument precision, and the like, but as long as you keep testing and keep getting the same results it hints at a constant territory and so maps can be improved (or at least become more consistent)

actually very similar to my definition, actually.

Philosophically, objective reality exists outside of our perception of it, but without perceptions we can't interact with it. Think of the difference between a map and the territory it represents..

Sorry I'm not being clear, I think. I mean assigning an equal probability to all possible diety-like beings. Ok so this gets tricky because many possible dieties will be mutually exclusive, but this does hint at a reasonable agnostic position. please tell me what "implies belief in at least one diety" would mean in probability terms. A devout christian may believe that Jesus is the son of God and that other Gods don't exist with a p = .99. Since the distribution of possible Gods is basically continuous, assigning equal probability to any one existing results in p of almost surely zero for any given possibility, though this doesn't imply impossibility (we're talking about belief, here) I am implying the binary status of god/not god might be too simplistic.

The series has been great, though if Martin pulls a Robert Jordon, I may just go ape shit on him myself.

doG - giving equal probability to all possibilities

I'd say that's a pretty gross simplification of a complex and varied political ideology. That's like saying all republicans care about is God and guns or that liberals are closet socialists. Why are anecdotes about hair dryer cords and cordiality showing up on a post about defining freedom?

The evolutionary explanation for sex being pleasurable is that pleasure would encourage reproduction. The more pleasurable sex is, the more we'd want to do it, a trait that would clearly result in amplification thanks to greater numbers of offspring. Enjoying sex, with the moderate hack of taking away the reproductive component, is perfectly rational behavior for pleasure-maximizing ulititaritons. why not simply Pascal's wager taken to its logical conclusion? ie - an affirmative belief regarding some small probability of there being a diety-like thing.

In a phrase, the application of Bayes rule for epistemic gain

cross posted... by two days? Can't speak for the whole group, but the few libertarians I know that are opposed to drug use still agree with decriminalization, particularly for marijuana. Well isn't hemp illegalization just one of many examples of this?

almost, except where religions rely on just-so stories, science rely on vigorous analysis and observations. That's not to say that religious analysis can't be vigorous or religious people analytical, but the observation part, when it comes to science is very important to justify inferences. Religion not so much.

If conservatives were consistent, they'd be libertarians.

oh, good to know.

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