34:07
And, you know, to take the one bright side is, is that,
34:12
you know, we’re hearing in the wake of this a lot of calls for, you know, we need to regulate crypto.
34:20
We need to come up with some regulation, to help this, the system and my kind of view on it
34:28
is that we already have regulations on fraud. They’re called fraud, right?
34:34
I mean, like we we don’t need more laws to say that when you take customer money and gamble with it, then that is illegal.
34:43
That already is a violation of law. If you start to, quote unquote, regulate crypto.
34:50
What you’re going to do is you’re going to bring it into that corrupt system that you’re talking about.
Relevant for the idea that we already have laws against fraud, and the goal should be to enforce them better, not to make new laws. If you make a bunch of new or industry-specific laws to regulate something, instead of using generic fraud laws, then they often end up corrupt. Industry lobbyists (and politicians who received tons of money) help write the specific laws for their industry and so the extra regulations on their industry actually end up enabling and protecting what was already fraud according to the more general purpose, older, traditional laws. The purpose of heavily regulating an industry can be to overwrite some of the standard anti-fraud law to enable fraud, in addition to adding huge barriers to entry to keep out smaller competitors who can’t deal with all the extra paperwork and other costs.
At a brief glance, Mises/etc definitely address some of his claims, and the author ignoring (classical) liberal ideas would likely be my biggest complaint about the book. If the book is particularly good (I have no idea how good it is), I might agree with most of what it says (I do read some way-above-average leftist authors), but still believe it got some major conclusions wrong. I tend to agree more regarding what some significant problems are than what the solutions are.
I don’t want to look at the book any closer unless there is any advocate of those ideas who is willing to discuss them.
I have fact checked a lot of books and papers and found that the majority of books with a lot of end notes, cites, quotes, etc., are actually unreliable. Books that appear well sourced often use that to impress readers rather using sources in a rational, correctness-oriented way. Some authors even decide on their reasoning and conclusions first, then tack on sources and cites later (or, worse, have an assistant add sources based mostly on reading titles and abstracts, so the author hasn’t even read the abstracts let alone text for most of his own sources). People also frequently treat citing in terms of social climbing games: it’s a way to name-drop people and/or to elevate someone’s status. People can trade cites like they trade favors.
I have not looked at this particularly book’s sources at all, so I have no idea if it’s better sourced than many other books or not. This is merely a generic warning. A statement like “it is well sourced” is not convincing to me, and correlates pretty well with the speaker making some mistakes, so I wanted to give a warning.
Asymmetric Debate
In my opinion, a main problem with the anti-capitalists (and many, many other groups) is the glaring asymmetry about attempting to answer the other side’s arguments. E.g. Hazlitt (a prominent intellectual, not someone obscure) published two books about why Keynes was wrong, but I’ve been unable to find anything from Keynes’ (considerably more popular and influential) side attempting to answer Hazlitt. As far as I’ve been able to find, the situation with Mises’ criticisms of socialism is similar, except the socialists answered him initially when they thought it’d be pretty easy, then they started ignoring him when they figured out it was very hard, if not impossible, to fix the flaws he pointed out. They actually tried the “EA Judo” trick.
Similarly, one of the things I like about Popper is he actually reads, summarizes and criticizes ideas from people he disagrees with, whereas the Bayesians behave rather differently. There’s also a long, two-volume book of essays solicited from Popper’s critics and Popper’s replies to all of them.
Sacred Cow
Similarly, I just watched the movie Sacred Cow (which opposes both factory farming and veganism). Unlike the pro-vegan film The Game Changers, I couldn’t tell, just from watching it, that it was wrong. So I tried to look for debunkings and counter-arguments. It was posted on EA and no one from EA offered any substantial criticism. The OP who posted it had already looked for counter-arguments in 7 different EA-related places that he listed before posting. The OP also answered a couple things EAers replied with, and then he got no answers back. This is a good example of how EA has no one taking responsibility for addressing critics and a lack of organized debate – it’s an example of the more general issues about debate and rationality that brought up with EA.
I also checked a web search and r/vegan and r/debateavegan on Reddit and found hardly any counter-arguments and nothing convincing. So I see a significant asymmetry.
I did see a criticism of a tweet by one of the creator involved with the movie, and the tweet was indeed awful and convinced me that he’s personally an untrustworthy tribalist, but it was dissimilar to the movie. A fair amount of criticism claimed the people making the movie were biased, which is probably true (despite being claimed with poor arguments), but does not refute any of the claims in the movie. What I particularly was looking for, and did not find, was errors in the movie’s reasoning and factual claims, not attacks on the people involved.
I did find a couple claims re beef that could be good, relevant arguments if they were 1) true 2) argued instead of asserted. Example:
There’s really an overwhelming quantity of evidence to support the health benefits of reducing meat-consumption with respect to cardiovascular and cancer outcomes.
I’ve already looked into this and determined that it’s basically false. This is talking about correlation studies and it’s cherry-picking. There are correlations that have been found (including other ones he’s ignoring), but they don’t just generically show that meat is bad. They show other things like processed food being bad or the people who don’t listen to mainstream health advice in one way being more likely to also not listen in other ways.
And the person asserting this did not provide the evidence that he claims exists. He just refers people to reading studies personally, themselves, instead of referring people to e.g. a blog post that summarizes and quotes studies and lays out the argument. But at least it’s a relevant issue. If I was making a tree of the state of the debate, I would cover this.
Here are two major problems with referring people to reading the studies:
They might read the studies then disagree with your conclusions. It’s just assuming your interpretation of the studies is the only one and no further arguments are needed, which is wrong. And it fails to explain how you’re interpretting the studies, so if you’re wrong your reasoning has not been shared and can’t be criticized. And it doesn’t take responsibility for the correctness of any particular study, so if you go read three, and refute all of them, the guy might just say you read the wrong studies, or the others are better, etc. (Plus it’s on Reddit so presumably if you take the time to read studies, the thread will then be too old and you’ll just get ignored if you try to continue the discussion.)
It’s way too much work and requires a lot of skill that most people lack. It doesn’t make sense to expect every individual to go read a dozen studies and do all their own research. That’s hard and inefficient. Secondary sources that summarize literature and use some quotes are better for most people. A few people should do careful research, and then write about it, so that not everyone has to. Secondary sources also provide better targets for criticism than being referred to the literature in general. I could refute a couple studies and people would just say e.g. “the evidence is overwhelming; some of the other studies are better”. People need to pick specific studies and make specific claims that could be refuted or they aren’t doing a reasonable job of exposing their ideas to criticism.
Another actually relevant argument I found was a claim about soy production being mostly to feed animals. It lacked detail but had a link. And it was factually false and also ignorant or dishonest (because the topic was cows, but soy is barely fed to cows). But again it’d be a topic worth covering in a current state of the debate tree.
Also, on a related note, I found out that plant farming kills a lot of animals, and I’ve been unable to find any good response to this issue from vegans. One of the main counter-points is that there are only a few studies quantifying how many animals are killed by plant farming, and their quality isn’t very good. I think that’s true but then vegans should be interested in doing better studies and making better non-study-based-estimates, not just pretending there’s no issue here due to lack of good studies. I think the response to finding out about this threat to animals shows that the bulk of the vegan leadership and possibly movement in general is more about preventing meat eating than protecting animals, in addition to being an example of how there isn’t much productive, organized debate going on (and vegans are one of the groups contributing to that problem instead helping solve it).
I think that’s a really good result – to get that much agreement across a large gap of disagreement, different background knowledge, different perspectives, etc. In cases where you don’t see what to do with some information, you could ask.
I’m unclear on whether you’re trying to fully end the discussion or not. If you changed your mind about ending it, and you want me to answer issues or explain stuff to you, you’ll have to make some kinda clear statements about your decision/intentions/plans/etc., and then I’ll consider it. Otherwise I’m just commenting on a few things I choose to and doing some wrapping up.
If you want to stick around and gradually engage with me, my writing and/or my community, and learn more about these ideas over time, you’re welcome to do that.
Popper advocated the value of talking with people who are significantly different than you and trying to communicate despite the difficulties. I agree and think the activity is important and more people should do more of it. Too many people stick to echo chambers. EA is not nearly so bad an echo chamber as e.g. some parts of Twitter or Facebook, but in general it’s too much of an echo chamber to engage with a Popperian, Objectivist, classical liberal (or e.g. a Sacred Cow fan), which I think is really bad.
But anyway, I thought I did set realistic expectations:
When I said it’s learnable, I meant learnable in a way that you like it, don’t have motivation problems, aren’t bored, it isn’t sluggish, everything works well.
CB:
Wow, this means you could have an entire class of people, including ones who have trouble with maths (with like say complex equations), and you 'd be able to teach them to do maths in ways they like ? That would be very impressive! I’d like to learn more, do you have sources on that ?
ET:
In terms of the subject matter itself, math is one of the better starting points. However, people often have some other stuff that gets in the way like issues with procrastination, motivation, project management, sleep schedule, “laziness”, planning ahead, time preference, resource budgeting (including mental energy), self-awareness, emotions, drug use (including caffeine, alcohol or nicotine), or clashes between their conscious ideas and intuitions/subconscious ideas. These things can be disruptive to math learning, so they may need to be addressed first. In other words, if one is conflicted about learning math – if part of them wants to and part doesn’t – then they may need to deal with that before studying math. There are also a lot of people who are mentally tired most of the time and they need to improve that situation rather than undertake a new project involving lots of thinking.
Also most current educational materials for math, like most topics, are not very good. It takes significant skill or help to deal with that.
CB (note: the text within quotation marks is a paraphrase presented as hypothetical speech, not a direct quote):
Sounds like quite the challenge to learn maths ! I can understand why “you need to be really motivated and allocate a lot of time and resources and to avoid coffee and alcohol and cigarettes and to solve your problems of sleep and procrastination and emotions in order to learn maths” leads to not many people really learning maths !
I wouldn’t count on many people learning these skills in such a context.
And I though the issue was only because the educational material was poor.
Ok, then I’m not sure learning maths is the most valuable use of my time right now. Especially since I mostly aggregate the work of other experts and I let them do the research and the maths in my stead.
ET:
Each individual thing is a solvable problem. But, yes, I don’t expect many people to solve a long list of problems. But I still claim it is possible .
Learning complex stuff takes a lot of work and problem solving.
With you, as with many others, nothing I said was refuted, I made no substantial mistakes (you aren’t even claiming otherwise as far as I know), and you conceded some of my points. To repeatedly get debating results like that is exceptionally good, isn’t it?
I ended up spending a lot of time explaining instead of debating. Why? You were not familiar with Popper, were not willing to familiarize yourself with Popper, did not know of any refutation of Popper’s major, relevant claims by anyone else who had studied Popper instead of you, didn’t want to go search for that, and did not know of anyone else willing to help debate or research for your side. You had no similar claims or cites that I couldn’t answer, leaving the situation asymmetric. (The same situation also applies regarding Mises and some others.) In that kind of situation, my opinion is that you already lost the debate and should change a bunch of your opinions to “I don’t know”. But I tried to discuss further anyway instead of just stopping there, emphasizing that situation, and insisting that nothing else particularly matters to the debate.
I read the post you linked to, and I agree with it, for the most part. It’s a conclusion that I also reached.
This is why I did not want to debate veganism, and instead wanted to debate factory farming. (Note that people in EA tend to focus much less on veganism itself than in the rest of animal rights movements - but this is less true in the “clean meat” side of EA)
Some in EA have argued that we shouldn’t advocate people to go away from beef, for a variety of reasons:
There’s very little chance that people will care about rodents killed in crops if they don’t care about the animals killed to go into their plates
Switching to purely grass-fed, pasture-raised cows would imply a very large reduction in meat consumption. Asking people to switch to do a switch to cows wouldn’t change the main problem: scale.
As the top comment in the post you linked to said, almost all the meat you can buy today is from factory farms (in rich countries). So in practice, recommending a switch to only sustainable meat would be very hard.
Of course, a message like “stop eating meat except if you can be very sure of where it comes from despite very poor labelling and living far from the farm” is harder to share and act on than “just stop eating meat”.
I’m sure the author of Sacred Cow is aware of these points (and probably points to this elsewhere).
Note that the links he points to arguing for veganism are from the “clean meat” side of things - where, for the reasons above, I would think that spending much time on replacing beef with something else would be counter-productive.
But I also understand why his arguments would not lead to a complete change in how most EAs currently do things. There is a much bigger focus on chicken (because of sheer numbers), and increasingly, fish and wild animals. It has a different approach than the standard “go vegan” messaging (which I understand is flawed).
I still do not really understand what Popper is saying, and how this is relevant to your conclusions, despite reading many of your articles. I think you should provide a summary of what he says to make people understand why Popper matters and how it’s relevant to the arguments you make. If I don’t grasp the basic idea of how Popper related to what we talked about, I have no way of knowing that he’s worth the read.
Well, the issue I have is that you say many things that hard to verify, because they are rather abstract or cannot be tested. Of course it’s hard to refute that, or to point out mistakes. But I think that “saying things that are hard to refute” is a separate property than “being correct about how the world works” (although I understand there’s often overlap, it’s not enough by itself). It’s why I give more value to evidence - it can be verified.
I conceded points, indeed, and it was on stuff that was easier to verify with evidence (like when I understated the amount of fraud done by factory farms).
I lost the debate, it’s clear, because your point of view didn’t change much. If both of our minds weren’t substantially changed, then in my view this means that we both lost the debate. This is unfortunate, I prefer when we both win.
Still, I got to see how you were thinking, and in a totally different way that I did, and it was interesting to see how very different worldviews can arise.
Reading back, I can see that.
Indeed.
Yes, I think I’m doing some last commenting too because this deserves some wrapping up.
You were transparent - and you deserved some explanations, indeed.
I’d like to to get type of win, but you didn’t say anything new to me, except details (that didn’t contradict my beliefs). Nor did anyone else from EA.
You questioned my debate skill and track record. I responded. Now you’re redefining winning debates to a different concept (a reasonable one in general, but not the one we were talking about). That’s a biased, goal-post-moving response. It’s taking what I said out of context, or responding as if the context were different.
This text makes vague claims with no examples and no realistic way that I could write a rebuttal to it. It’s partly philosophically confused, partly false, and partly self-refuting (the truth of your characterization of our discussion and my reasoning is hard to verify or refute, and doesn’t use evidence, so this text violates the principles it advocates). It’s also repeating points I already attempted to answer instead of engaging with my answers.
After you leave, I hope you’ll consider advocating more engagement in debate to your allies. Otherwise you all could be wrong, and stay wrong, avoidably, because your entire side has no one who will debate adequately to reach conclusions (or who will do things like research and engage with the ideas of a well known thinker like Popper or Mises – so if you’re wrong and better reasoning is in non-obscure books, you guys will stay wrong anyway). Or if you can find any advocates of some of your ideas who are open to ongoing discussion, debate and research aimed at reaching conclusions – and who’d actually like to speak to someone who disagrees and is willing to discuss – please send them to me.
I will try to do that if I find someone I think would be a good fit for a discussion with you, and who is apt at debating using philosophical arguments.
