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"For these people this sort of betting site isn't just a betting site" just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the

"For these people this sort of betting site isn't just a betting site" just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal "i'm not burgling, this is how i engage in understanding economics and the primary means of discourse, and the government should have no authority to take action against me"

Kamq 4y ago
> just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal The comment you're replying to is an argument that it should be legal. It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument. It's like when vegans try to stop you in the grocery store for eating meat, which they say is murder. It's actually not murder. That's just an emotional value they choose to assign, and I'm not going to jail for my hamburger. They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The comment made claims that something that's illegal should be legal because some people using it understand things through it. That doesn't really make sense to me. Pick any gross crime, then claim the criminal is using that crime to understand things. It's pretty easy to do this through burglary stories about assembling evidence, or vigilantism stories. Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. The law also doesn't. Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?" It's actually not very hard to answer that, and the rest falls neatly into place from there.
  - Kamq 4y ago
    > They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The difference here is that this is a category argument, that is to say it's an argument about what is, whereas the argument about legality is about what should be. Arguments about what is vs arguments about what ought to be are very different things. Additionally, murder generally has a component of crime associated with it, this is why other forms of killing that are government sanctioned also generally don't fall into this category (e.g. killing during war and government sanctioned executions are generally not murder). The legal status is a fairly decent argument that it belongs in a different category, unless you want to invoke natural law. But, we should note, that the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal. The current legal status of something is immaterial to an argument about what it should be. If it were a good counter argument, we'd never be able to criminalize anything and we'd never be able to legalize anything that was currently illegal. This is, I suppose, fine if you consider every law to be timelessly perfect, and the system of laws to be complete and never need changing. However, I've never met anyone who believes such a thing. > Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. That's fine, and a perfectly legitimate position to take. I also assume it's the majority position within society. But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.
    - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
      > The difference here is that this is a category argument Yes, that is the nature of legality, and not actually a problem in any way. Let's try to simplify this without hiding behind any half-correctly used thesaurus words, shall we? 1) It's illegal for a reason 2) Things don't stop being illegal just because someone wants them . > the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal You seem to spend a lot of time presuming that someone needs a counterargument. You haven't made a successful argument yet, and even if you did, it doesn't hold any kind of weight. When someone explains to you why they aren't very interested in what you said, and your response is "that isn't a valid counter-argument," the net result is that they still won't be very interested in what you said, and the illegal thing remains illegal. If you want to talk about category arguments, start here: why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight, and at what point does your failure to garner interest take precedence over whatever your position may be? . > You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. Literally all of society does. This gets discovered every day by someone who really, really wants to explain why the law shouldn't apply to them. Tassles on the admiralty flag, and all of that. . > But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be. I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal.
      - JoshCole 4y ago
        > I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal. Do you not live in the US? I'm not sure why you would be confused about this. It seems like a silly thing to be confused by. > Literally all of society does. This is false. > why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight, and at what point does your failure to garner interest take precedence over whatever your position may be? It was made by humans who have inherent worth which I take to be self-evident? And it did garner the interest I was hoping for - I got answers from kinder people than you who explained things to me in easily understood sentences that I found no flaw with. Ctrl+F "thank". Actually even the idea of garnering interest as the important thing seems kind of suspect to me. That small interaction got the least interest out of all that I've said - yet is the one I'm most glad to have made. I would not be greatly saddened if the only interaction I had was with that single post.
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    Appeal to grossness is fallacious. Describing a different situation and claiming it is the same while not having congruent properties is an abuse of abstraction. The substitution method for logically reasoning by analogy is only as strong as the similarity between the situations. This is why I consider the argument refuted when I show that there isn't alignment between Theft - a gross crime - and participation in a betting market, something that people enter into by mutual consent and with hope. The lack of congruence makes the argument fundamentally lacking in validity. For more on why this I find this to be bad reasoning by analogy see things of this nature: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/#ForCriStrMapThe https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/#ForCri... When the argument moves to the appeal to the law it is also fallacious, for there is not one law, but many. That law is different in different places: in this case in particular it is not the case that the law is universally against betting markets. There are places where it is legal. Moreover the law changes over time. Even in our locational context when you vary time you will find that there were periods in which betting markets were not illegal. Even beyond that the law regularly allows nuance when it encounters interaction with political concerns: to kill for your country in war is legal, but to do the same outside that political contest is not. To enforce justice in the context of law enforcement is not legal except by those who are appointed. Yet to do so unappointed is not. In democracies since every person is appointed to be a part of the political body such that they vote to influence policies they all have a mandate that allows them to engage in politics - this supersedes the usual laws for much the same reason that a policeman because he has a mandate as a policeman has the right to do things that would be illegal for non-policeman to do. I want to point out something that seems worthy of attention to me to hopefully reduce your confidence in the strength of the argument. When the argument you advanced says things like this: > Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?" The argument did not build up to them. It is not justifying them. They are non-sequiturs. It reads as if it thinks the reasoning is very strong and obviously correct such that it comes across as quite dismissive, but just because an argument contains a word like convincing doesn't mean the structure has the property of being convincing. To stress how tortured the arguments analogy is - there are gross crimes for which it is legal on the basis that they are used to understand things. What is called homocide when it kills someone outside medical research and what is called the crime of animal cruelty when it is done outside medical research is not equivalent when it is done in the context of medical research. Admittedly this is not an argument against regulation, but then - I never said it should be unregulated - I asked why we allow the oppression of political discussion in this circumstance. That the argument includes things like "nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles" and asked obvious questions does not convince me of the position that the argument asks me to take on. It convinces me that people ought to ask those questions instead of assuming the answers. Except - it doesn't truly do even that, because I consider the claim that no one has ever asked the obvious questions to be a false premise.
JoshCole 4y ago
Theft isn't people coming together for the purpose of aligning incentives so as to share information with each other while remaining rational. This has far more in common with Truth than it does with Theft. First and foremost, because it was by agreement that they entered into the arrangement - none were forced. Second and also motivating it, because losses are taken in hope: that a better understanding of the underlying conditions is obtained by the whole of the community which is of benefit to even the losing participant.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  - JoshCole 4y ago
    > The "rational market hypothesis" has nothing to do with the rationality of individual actors. It sucks that the rationality community started calling themselves that since now people get confused when you talk about the aspirations of empirical skeptic communities trying to act selflessly. Language kind of sucks - even the word selfless doesn't quite capture what I'm trying to say. It is all to imprecise. Which is why.. > I think you're flying on social media knowledge. I generally try to think in terms of game theory - especially the equilibrium considerations. I'm very far from the general consensus about what intelligence and rationality are - for example, I don't believe that pejorative cognitive bias and predictable irrationality exist with the strength that some do. I've found studying the sort of machine learning that is not often used in practice because it is computationally intractable to be a better guide to understanding than the inductive approach most people seem to favor. > This is word salad. In non-cooperative games selfish play produces information hiding. You play a harder to predict policy because it makes you unexploitable. In cooperative games you can play an easy to predict policy, because it makes you predictable, which allows coordination. I think these correspond with Lies and Truth. Fiction and facts and lies and truth don't seem to be the same thing to me. Obviously, Theft corresponds with selfish strategies, the Lies strategy. If this still seems like word salad sit awhile with these questions: if there are three doors two labeled A and one labeled B and two agents have to pick a door without communicating with each other which ought they to pick. Now lets say one agent is trying to kill the other agent and this happens if they pick the same door. Which should they pick? I capitalized the words, not because I didn't know what they mean, but because I have very precise ideas of what I'm trying to talk about. > I don't believe you've ever taken an economics class. I have an intuitive feeling that there is a justification for preventing people from working together so as to better understand things; but your approach isn't it at all. The rationality community which often promotes the use of prediction markets also happens to be champions of effective altruism. Some of it is probably signaling - the best love is quiet since then it came from the right place - but trying to pretend these people are all comparable to thieves seems too far to me. It doesn't give me greater confidence in the strength of your argument that you've abandoned it in favor of character attacks. Someone who strongly believed they were right would be courageous enough to try and explain their position with more depth and clarify the terms. Since it seems to me you want to "win" go with the perverse incentive angle. I've been rolling it around in my mind for a while and while there are aspects to it that seem common to all situations with hidden information I'm definitely not confident enough to disagree with it. You'll get to carry your "victory" over me around as a mark of something. Internet points? I'll even be one of the people who give them to you, because generally when someone asks questions in good faith they rather intended to get answers in good faith. You can try to act like you meant that all along when you implied that the people I was trying to discuss were thieves and I'll be powerless to refute you, because I'm still puzzled by the issues. On the other hand, if you actually have the answers - please share. I'm not claiming knowledge, but ignorance.
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal The bigger question here is, why is it illegal? Most rational adults understand that the arbitrary decision to ban adults from "gambling" their own money in certain ways, while promoting gambling in other ways is absolutely ridiculous. Here in New York I can today bet on sports and horse racing from my phone or my computer. I am pilloried with ads to play lotto - perhaps the worst form of gambling with only a 50% return on investment in most games - by the state itself! But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker or predict-it. It reeks of the authoritarian hypocrisy that is the defining feature of our government on every level.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  Sadly I think in modern society we have shifted from having to justify why something should be illegal, and today for many the default assumption is that all activity should be illegal and one should need to justify the value, subjective "goodness", or utility of an activity, business, device, etc for it is be ruled "legal" >by the state itself! But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker or predict-it I think you have hit on the root cause, poker and other games of skill is harder for the government to inject themselves into it, harder to control the odds and revenue (like lottery), etc.
  - mateo411 4y ago
    >I think you have hit on the root cause, poker and other games of skill is harder for the government to inject themselves into it, harder to control the odds and revenue (like lottery), etc. I don't think so. You can just grant a gaming license for a card room. In order to maintain the gaming license the establishment has to pay a yearly licensing fee to the government. That seems pretty straightforward.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    they did, in fact, very clearly justify why this should be illegal.

Kamq 4y ago

> just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal The comment you're replying to is an argument that it should be legal. It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago
> It's current status as illegal is not a counterargument. It's like when vegans try to stop you in the grocery store for eating meat, which they say is murder. It's actually not murder. That's just an emotional value they choose to assign, and I'm not going to jail for my hamburger. They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The comment made claims that something that's illegal should be legal because some people using it understand things through it. That doesn't really make sense to me. Pick any gross crime, then claim the criminal is using that crime to understand things. It's pretty easy to do this through burglary stories about assembling evidence, or vigilantism stories. Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. The law also doesn't. Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?" It's actually not very hard to answer that, and the rest falls neatly into place from there.
- Kamq 4y ago
  > They might tell me that "it's legal isn't a counterargument," but actually, it is. The difference here is that this is a category argument, that is to say it's an argument about what is, whereas the argument about legality is about what should be. Arguments about what is vs arguments about what ought to be are very different things. Additionally, murder generally has a component of crime associated with it, this is why other forms of killing that are government sanctioned also generally don't fall into this category (e.g. killing during war and government sanctioned executions are generally not murder). The legal status is a fairly decent argument that it belongs in a different category, unless you want to invoke natural law. But, we should note, that the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal. The current legal status of something is immaterial to an argument about what it should be. If it were a good counter argument, we'd never be able to criminalize anything and we'd never be able to legalize anything that was currently illegal. This is, I suppose, fine if you consider every law to be timelessly perfect, and the system of laws to be complete and never need changing. However, I've never met anyone who believes such a thing. > Should that suddenly be legal, due to their motivation? I don't think so, personally. You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. That's fine, and a perfectly legitimate position to take. I also assume it's the majority position within society. But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    > The difference here is that this is a category argument Yes, that is the nature of legality, and not actually a problem in any way. Let's try to simplify this without hiding behind any half-correctly used thesaurus words, shall we? 1) It's illegal for a reason 2) Things don't stop being illegal just because someone wants them . > the harvesting of meat is currently legal is a terrible counter argument to an argument that it should be illegal You seem to spend a lot of time presuming that someone needs a counterargument. You haven't made a successful argument yet, and even if you did, it doesn't hold any kind of weight. When someone explains to you why they aren't very interested in what you said, and your response is "that isn't a valid counter-argument," the net result is that they still won't be very interested in what you said, and the illegal thing remains illegal. If you want to talk about category arguments, start here: why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight, and at what point does your failure to garner interest take precedence over whatever your position may be? . > You find the argument, personally, unconvincing. Literally all of society does. This gets discovered every day by someone who really, really wants to explain why the law shouldn't apply to them. Tassles on the admiralty flag, and all of that. . > But, it doesn't make current conditions relevant to a conversations about how they ought to be. I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal.
    - JoshCole 4y ago
      > I'm not sure why you believe your statements on your opinions of what "ought" to be should bear weight on what is nationally legal. Do you not live in the US? I'm not sure why you would be confused about this. It seems like a silly thing to be confused by. > Literally all of society does. This is false. > why do you feel that commentary on social media is inherently deserving of weight, and at what point does your failure to garner interest take precedence over whatever your position may be? It was made by humans who have inherent worth which I take to be self-evident? And it did garner the interest I was hoping for - I got answers from kinder people than you who explained things to me in easily understood sentences that I found no flaw with. Ctrl+F "thank". Actually even the idea of garnering interest as the important thing seems kind of suspect to me. That small interaction got the least interest out of all that I've said - yet is the one I'm most glad to have made. I would not be greatly saddened if the only interaction I had was with that single post.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  Appeal to grossness is fallacious. Describing a different situation and claiming it is the same while not having congruent properties is an abuse of abstraction. The substitution method for logically reasoning by analogy is only as strong as the similarity between the situations. This is why I consider the argument refuted when I show that there isn't alignment between Theft - a gross crime - and participation in a betting market, something that people enter into by mutual consent and with hope. The lack of congruence makes the argument fundamentally lacking in validity. For more on why this I find this to be bad reasoning by analogy see things of this nature: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/#ForCriStrMapThe https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/#ForCri... When the argument moves to the appeal to the law it is also fallacious, for there is not one law, but many. That law is different in different places: in this case in particular it is not the case that the law is universally against betting markets. There are places where it is legal. Moreover the law changes over time. Even in our locational context when you vary time you will find that there were periods in which betting markets were not illegal. Even beyond that the law regularly allows nuance when it encounters interaction with political concerns: to kill for your country in war is legal, but to do the same outside that political contest is not. To enforce justice in the context of law enforcement is not legal except by those who are appointed. Yet to do so unappointed is not. In democracies since every person is appointed to be a part of the political body such that they vote to influence policies they all have a mandate that allows them to engage in politics - this supersedes the usual laws for much the same reason that a policeman because he has a mandate as a policeman has the right to do things that would be illegal for non-policeman to do. I want to point out something that seems worthy of attention to me to hopefully reduce your confidence in the strength of the argument. When the argument you advanced says things like this: > Nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles and said "why is unregulated gambling illegal?" The argument did not build up to them. It is not justifying them. They are non-sequiturs. It reads as if it thinks the reasoning is very strong and obviously correct such that it comes across as quite dismissive, but just because an argument contains a word like convincing doesn't mean the structure has the property of being convincing. To stress how tortured the arguments analogy is - there are gross crimes for which it is legal on the basis that they are used to understand things. What is called homocide when it kills someone outside medical research and what is called the crime of animal cruelty when it is done outside medical research is not equivalent when it is done in the context of medical research. Admittedly this is not an argument against regulation, but then - I never said it should be unregulated - I asked why we allow the oppression of political discussion in this circumstance. That the argument includes things like "nobody looking at this situation has even started from first principles" and asked obvious questions does not convince me of the position that the argument asks me to take on. It convinces me that people ought to ask those questions instead of assuming the answers. Except - it doesn't truly do even that, because I consider the claim that no one has ever asked the obvious questions to be a false premise.

JoshCole 4y ago

Theft isn't people coming together for the purpose of aligning incentives so as to share information with each other while remaining rational. This has far more in common with Truth than it does with Theft. First and foremost, because it was by agreement that they entered into the arrangement - none were forced. Second and also motivating it, because losses are taken in hope: that a better understanding of the underlying conditions is obtained by the whole of the community which is of benefit to even the losing participant.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago
- JoshCole 4y ago
  > The "rational market hypothesis" has nothing to do with the rationality of individual actors. It sucks that the rationality community started calling themselves that since now people get confused when you talk about the aspirations of empirical skeptic communities trying to act selflessly. Language kind of sucks - even the word selfless doesn't quite capture what I'm trying to say. It is all to imprecise. Which is why.. > I think you're flying on social media knowledge. I generally try to think in terms of game theory - especially the equilibrium considerations. I'm very far from the general consensus about what intelligence and rationality are - for example, I don't believe that pejorative cognitive bias and predictable irrationality exist with the strength that some do. I've found studying the sort of machine learning that is not often used in practice because it is computationally intractable to be a better guide to understanding than the inductive approach most people seem to favor. > This is word salad. In non-cooperative games selfish play produces information hiding. You play a harder to predict policy because it makes you unexploitable. In cooperative games you can play an easy to predict policy, because it makes you predictable, which allows coordination. I think these correspond with Lies and Truth. Fiction and facts and lies and truth don't seem to be the same thing to me. Obviously, Theft corresponds with selfish strategies, the Lies strategy. If this still seems like word salad sit awhile with these questions: if there are three doors two labeled A and one labeled B and two agents have to pick a door without communicating with each other which ought they to pick. Now lets say one agent is trying to kill the other agent and this happens if they pick the same door. Which should they pick? I capitalized the words, not because I didn't know what they mean, but because I have very precise ideas of what I'm trying to talk about. > I don't believe you've ever taken an economics class. I have an intuitive feeling that there is a justification for preventing people from working together so as to better understand things; but your approach isn't it at all. The rationality community which often promotes the use of prediction markets also happens to be champions of effective altruism. Some of it is probably signaling - the best love is quiet since then it came from the right place - but trying to pretend these people are all comparable to thieves seems too far to me. It doesn't give me greater confidence in the strength of your argument that you've abandoned it in favor of character attacks. Someone who strongly believed they were right would be courageous enough to try and explain their position with more depth and clarify the terms. Since it seems to me you want to "win" go with the perverse incentive angle. I've been rolling it around in my mind for a while and while there are aspects to it that seem common to all situations with hidden information I'm definitely not confident enough to disagree with it. You'll get to carry your "victory" over me around as a mark of something. Internet points? I'll even be one of the people who give them to you, because generally when someone asks questions in good faith they rather intended to get answers in good faith. You can try to act like you meant that all along when you implied that the people I was trying to discuss were thieves and I'll be powerless to refute you, because I'm still puzzled by the issues. On the other hand, if you actually have the answers - please share. I'm not claiming knowledge, but ignorance.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

>just because you choose to assign it some other emotional value doesn't change that the core purpose is illegal The bigger question here is, why is it illegal? Most rational adults understand that the arbitrary decision to ban adults from "gambling" their own money in certain ways, while promoting gambling in other ways is absolutely ridiculous. Here in New York I can today bet on sports and horse racing from my phone or my computer. I am pilloried with ads to play lotto - perhaps the worst form of gambling with only a 50% return on investment in most games - by the state itself! But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker or predict-it. It reeks of the authoritarian hypocrisy that is the defining feature of our government on every level.

phpisthebest 4y ago
Sadly I think in modern society we have shifted from having to justify why something should be illegal, and today for many the default assumption is that all activity should be illegal and one should need to justify the value, subjective "goodness", or utility of an activity, business, device, etc for it is be ruled "legal" >by the state itself! But it is illegal for me to gamble on a skill-based game like poker or predict-it I think you have hit on the root cause, poker and other games of skill is harder for the government to inject themselves into it, harder to control the odds and revenue (like lottery), etc.
- mateo411 4y ago
  >I think you have hit on the root cause, poker and other games of skill is harder for the government to inject themselves into it, harder to control the odds and revenue (like lottery), etc. I don't think so. You can just grant a gaming license for a card room. In order to maintain the gaming license the establishment has to pay a yearly licensing fee to the government. That seems pretty straightforward.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  they did, in fact, very clearly justify why this should be illegal.