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Oh, agreed -- I'd like to see the notion of "private property" well protected moving forward. I just think the way its strongest advocates operate is going to d

by frig 17y ago

Oh, agreed -- I'd like to see the notion of "private property" well protected moving forward. I just think the way its strongest advocates operate is going to do much more harm than good (in, eg, the same way the Republicans slagging every last Democratic policy proposal with "that's socialism" is doing plenty to make socialism look harmless and appealing in the modern era). But, you have to be realistic: - if you accept a libertarian notion of self-ownership, then it follows that, eg, I ought nought to have you blow smoke in my face unless i consent to it (b/c you're tampering with my property, no)? - now, as a practical matter people agree to overlook certain things (eg: your campfire is infinitesimally smokifying my air here back in town, but it's so negligible that I ought not to care about it; very literally the stress of worrying about it is worse for me than your smoke is) - it'd be nice if you can adopt a universal standard for when your (infinitesimal) actions are something I have to ignore - but unless you already have that agreement you're back into coercing people; it does seem useful to you, I'm sure, to think that "since I've scientifically shown that my blowing smoke in your face doesn't actually harm you, so I'm going to keep doing it", but now you're not that far removed intellectually from eg eminent domain "I've demonstrated that demolishing your home in order to finish this expressway is manifestly for the economic benefit of the entire city -- including you -- so even though normally I'd like to respect your property rights in this patch of land today I say 'tough luck!'" - this is why the boundaries of private property are always ultimately a political problem: usually people are looking out for their own interest, as they choose to define it; to get someone to deliberately sacrifice their own perceived self-interest requires either force or politics; force works but is undesirable and doesn't scale, either, so you're left with politics This is where the folk libertarianism (along with any naive or simplistic approach to being pro-property-rights) is going to flounder in the new century, if present trends continue: - you can't pretend your actions "don't effect other people until they do"; the reality is that "your actions effect everyone else, but sometimes (usually, even) everyone else agrees to pretend as if they don't" - you look like a hypocrite if you on the one hand want to maintain absolute say over how you use your own resources but on the other hand want to force other people to accept your decisions about which uses of their property (their bodies, their air, etc.) they need to just man up and take; you also look stupid if you can't see this point - you also look politically and rhetorically dumb when you speak casually about what risk-of-harm to others you're comfortable ignoring (and would expect other people to ignore); it's rather obvious that, eg, DanielBMarkham is fine with, say, some action of his having a .001% odds of giving his neighor's kid asthma (picking at random) -- DanielBMarkham is not his neighbor's kid, after all -- but step outside the space of just "thinking in words" and you'll see why that's not a winning pose (it's made worse by the way that risk-of-harm is low-and-diffuse but harm is typically severe-and-concentrated). What I'm trying to drive home is that everything you've said is valid, but you're not going to change minds with that argument (at most you'll make people aware of a particular danger if you carry something to its logical extreme). I think the best long-term approach is to focus more on design and infrastructure (eg: intelligent garbage processing, products designed from start-to-finish to neatly decompose into recyclable components -- this is called "reverse logistics", fyi) rather than trying to directly win the political war over where the lines ought to be drawn. If you can get to where people can continue doing what they do now but with far less externality production, then you will easily be able to keep the lines drawn mostly where you'd want them to be (at least for most actors). The issue here is that to get to where it's safe to be mindless again is not going to happen promptly (if at all) without some kind of directed regulatory push; that is not only nontrivial -- and dangerous -- but also unlikely barring some other political shifts.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I think the discussion bifurcates here between two camps: the pragmatic camp, which describes the best way to reach various goals, and the principles camp, which describe reality (as they see it) whether or not goals are reached or not. Both prongs of this discussion have serious flaws. If you try to act only pragmatically (convincing your fellow citizen that a little chaos is necessary for the growth of the larger state) then progress, or the state of the argument, is completely dependent on your powers of persuasion and the current fight/mindset of your fellow citizen. That fails over time because creating limits are discussed at a much higher ratio than reducing them. I'd have to have a persuasive power of about 100:1 in order just to maintain the status quo. If, as I do, you believe there are some fundamental biological principles at play, then it really doesn't matter anyway. Either the principles are being respected or they are not. And sadly yes, I think it probably comes down to some sort of happy mathematical ratio. However, as you point out, arguing on principles in a society that is fear and risk-obsessed is a non-starter. And it's a really difficult argument to make that, while ten million people may blow smoke in other people's face, the loss of their freedom to move and act naturally is a greater loss than the hundred million who are annoyed with second-hand smoke (I am not a smoker, btw). But at the end of the day the better argument wins. That's just reality.
- frig 17y ago
  I think we've exhausted any vein of disagreement. That said, there's one thing I want to point out: I think you're overestimating the extent to which there are any natural principles that'll set in and show their hand; they're out there, but most human behavior that actually bumps into them gets corrected pretty fast, all things considered (a few decades, usually, between discovery and adaptation). For most of the debates of interest there aren't really principles you can fall back on, and even if you do there's a big "so what?", because principles do not in and of themselves supply a valuation. Let's stick with secondhand smoke. Let's assume it comes out that, eg, using much-more-definitive science than anything we currently have on the matter that there's a non-zero but seemingly negligible increase in risk of lung cancer from second-hand smoke (say: above some level of exposure your risk of lung cancer becomes 0.0002% instead of .0001%). This seems compelling, but at the end of the day it doesn't really help you resolve the issue of "secondhand smoke regulation" (without the backing of some state to dictate the resolution). It might be irrational, say, for the consensus opinion to be that secondhand smoke is worth banning even though other, unbanned activities have higher risks, but so what? The point of "owning" something is being able to do what you like with it without having to justify those actions to others; matters of fact can make certain conversations more likely to go one way instead of another but they ultimately are just dead facts on the table. An extreme example is something like trying to build an apartment complex over an indian burial ground; it's a pure battle of aesthetics that can't be won by reason alone. The "second-hand smoking" issue is only superficially different: it seems like there's more of a scientific aspect (does second-hand smoking actually cause harm?) but those facts only serve to inform the parties; without some agreement on underlying outlooks (how to interpret those facts) the facts don't do anything. One of the commonest forms of self-delusion in internet political arguing is to (unconsciously) assume enough about "the other side's" core beliefs and assumptions that for them to disagree with the conclusions you've drawn would be irrational; this isn't usually an intentional mistake, it just arises from a failure to conceptualize other people's outlooks as differing from your own in any fundamental way. What I see this century holding is (sadly) a huge flux in underlying outlooks; even when there are principles they depend on pragmatics to accomplish anything, and failing to deal with that flux will lead to sucking at pragmatics. I'm out, it's been a pleasant sunday.

by frig 17y ago

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I think the discussion bifurcates here between two camps: the pragmatic camp, which describes the best way to reach various goals, and the principles camp, which describe reality (as they see it) whether or not goals are reached or not. Both prongs of this discussion have serious flaws. If you try to act only pragmatically (convincing your fellow citizen that a little chaos is necessary for the growth of the larger state) then progress, or the state of the argument, is completely dependent on your powers of persuasion and the current fight/mindset of your fellow citizen. That fails over time because creating limits are discussed at a much higher ratio than reducing them. I'd have to have a persuasive power of about 100:1 in order just to maintain the status quo. If, as I do, you believe there are some fundamental biological principles at play, then it really doesn't matter anyway. Either the principles are being respected or they are not. And sadly yes, I think it probably comes down to some sort of happy mathematical ratio. However, as you point out, arguing on principles in a society that is fear and risk-obsessed is a non-starter. And it's a really difficult argument to make that, while ten million people may blow smoke in other people's face, the loss of their freedom to move and act naturally is a greater loss than the hundred million who are annoyed with second-hand smoke (I am not a smoker, btw). But at the end of the day the better argument wins. That's just reality.

frig 17y ago
I think we've exhausted any vein of disagreement. That said, there's one thing I want to point out: I think you're overestimating the extent to which there are any natural principles that'll set in and show their hand; they're out there, but most human behavior that actually bumps into them gets corrected pretty fast, all things considered (a few decades, usually, between discovery and adaptation). For most of the debates of interest there aren't really principles you can fall back on, and even if you do there's a big "so what?", because principles do not in and of themselves supply a valuation. Let's stick with secondhand smoke. Let's assume it comes out that, eg, using much-more-definitive science than anything we currently have on the matter that there's a non-zero but seemingly negligible increase in risk of lung cancer from second-hand smoke (say: above some level of exposure your risk of lung cancer becomes 0.0002% instead of .0001%). This seems compelling, but at the end of the day it doesn't really help you resolve the issue of "secondhand smoke regulation" (without the backing of some state to dictate the resolution). It might be irrational, say, for the consensus opinion to be that secondhand smoke is worth banning even though other, unbanned activities have higher risks, but so what? The point of "owning" something is being able to do what you like with it without having to justify those actions to others; matters of fact can make certain conversations more likely to go one way instead of another but they ultimately are just dead facts on the table. An extreme example is something like trying to build an apartment complex over an indian burial ground; it's a pure battle of aesthetics that can't be won by reason alone. The "second-hand smoking" issue is only superficially different: it seems like there's more of a scientific aspect (does second-hand smoking actually cause harm?) but those facts only serve to inform the parties; without some agreement on underlying outlooks (how to interpret those facts) the facts don't do anything. One of the commonest forms of self-delusion in internet political arguing is to (unconsciously) assume enough about "the other side's" core beliefs and assumptions that for them to disagree with the conclusions you've drawn would be irrational; this isn't usually an intentional mistake, it just arises from a failure to conceptualize other people's outlooks as differing from your own in any fundamental way. What I see this century holding is (sadly) a huge flux in underlying outlooks; even when there are principles they depend on pragmatics to accomplish anything, and failing to deal with that flux will lead to sucking at pragmatics. I'm out, it's been a pleasant sunday.