Elderly Randian forced to grow up

[james_davis_nicoll]

Greenspan said that he had found "a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."

Comments

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

Yah, it's always a little embarrassing when someone reaches his age and still believes in the laissez fairy.

Well, here's the problem ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

... there never really is Laissez Faire.

For example, critics of Laissez Faire will often point to the "deregulation" of energy in California in the 1990s and thereabouts, which led to miscellaneous brownouts and bankruptcies, with lot's of hurtin' all around -- moral, say the fans of "regulation", being that we shouldn't ever "deregulate" -- except that the deregulation of California power companies, in the minutiae and guts of its "deregulation", forbad those companies from passing on any cost increases to certain classes of consumers, with the result they couldn't pay for their own costs, and that's what led to the bankruptcies.

So, if you go hunt among the bull-rushes at the swamp's edge for a Murray Rothbard or a Peikoff (or the like), they will argue, not without merit, on the basis of that and other examples, that "the" problem is that we've never genuinely deregulated.

It's sort of the way that Marxists will explain away the implosion of the USSR, etc., on the grounds that it couldn't have been "real" Communism -- given the USSR had a (relatively) very wealthy governing class (the Nomenklatura with their Crimean Dachas, etc.), their plaint, too, is not without merit.

So: you go and press the local Ayn Rand groupies to tell you how much "deregulation" is "enough" to meet their litmus test for sufficiency.

And they'll tell you, that they still want Governments around to do stuff like define and enforce property rights, uphold contracts, and so on.

Which, unless I'm not understanding the plain meaning of English words, would be, um, regulation, right?

So, does "deregulation" even exist? Does the concept have any meaning whatsoever? At this stage in my progress toward senility and decrepitude, I've come to the conclusion that, no, it doesn't.

It's sort of the way Religious types (the kind who prattle on, on Sunday morning radio, or put on tall hats to make declarations about Morality from the immediate vicinity of Vatican City, etc.) always gas on about how we mustn't succumb to "materialist" beliefs.

So, what's a "materialist"?

Someone (who ?, where?), who apparently believes that "the world is made only of matter". Which, on the plain meaning of the actual words used, would mean a person who obviously doesn't "believe" in time, energy or information. I am unaware that any such person ever existed.

I think a lot of "debates" would just go away, if the participants were forbidden to ever use basically meaningless words (like "deregulation" or "materialist").

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

It's scientific materialism (or, perhaps more accurately, materialist monism) versus dualism in that context. It's the monism they object to, rather than the materialism per se.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul.

Bloody hell.

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Great. Now they're coming to fuck up my field as well...

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

First of all, thanks for alerting me to these two -- hadn't yet heard of this particular pair, even though I have wrestled with creationists in the past, ... only to discover, that there's no refuted -- by their own admission -- argument, that they will not recycle, if they think they're with a "new" audience that hadn't witnessed the demolition, whom they might still dupe with it. They don't actually care about The Truth, only about persuading people to join the Jeebus movement, as they imagine it.

Which is to say, they are not honest people with a differing understanding of the world, they are dishonest people -- but, I digress.

You write, "They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial".

I anticipate (without knowing it is so -- consider this a hypothesis to be tested by an experimental reading of their blathering) -- that they must do so by implicitly constructing a straw-man "brain".

A straw-man "brain" which rhetorically is material-atomic, but which is not material-electrical (i.e., gloss away the energy).

One which is material-achronous -- so scratch the relevance of time and memory.

One which is not actually fully synaptic -- hence, skip the connectivity, and therefore the information content.

Also, I imagine they'd be quite dismissive (or utterly ignorant) of all we know of Ramsey Theory and of Complexity Theory (viz., of emergent properties).

In other words, I predict they construct a conveniently refutable neuroscientific "materialism" that is not genuinely the point of view of any actual neuroscientist, living or dead.

They will then (I hypothesize) demolish this straw man, and climb the nearest hill in order to ululate this supposed triumph to the Moon.

(You know, there was a time, a one or two centuries ago, when Western religion at least tried to be an intellectual enterprise, rather than an anti-intellectual one. I'm not sure what forbidden fruit it ate, when, since then, but it certainly is in a fallen state by comparison, now.)

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[avram]

I thought that what led to the California brownouts and bankruptcies was Enron manipulating the energy market to force California power companies to buy on the spot market.

Which, I guess, just reinforces your point. More regulation could have prevented the problem, by (say) not having deregulated to begin with. Less regulation could also have solved it, by not having the prices capped.

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :^)

I wish I could have put it that succinctly, instead of rambling on as I did.

You understood me exactly.

Cheers.

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

Not nearly as embarrassing as someone who serves as the Federal Reserve chairman and still claims to believe in laissez-faire. You don't have to come down on any particular side to realize how insanely contradictory those two positions are.