My dad says quantum mechanics is bull**** and thinks classical mechanics is correct, but at the same time he got sent aboard to make a satelite engineering masters degree and got first place ( and the award was given to him by the queen of England).
So is my dad an intelectual??

Also intelectuals dont really improve the world unless they are involved on medicine or technology that isnt designed to kill people.

I will take a good high school teacher in a poor suburb over a philosopher with a phd and good publications every day.

I would say that he has very anti-intellectual positions on quantum mechanics. But is probably quite smart also.

No power in intellectualism, everyone's solid.

Rothbard et al. understood this well. Hence they became ideologues instead.

I don't see any problem with that statement. It's pretty much absurd to argue that blacks (as people living in the US and old enough to be listening to Malcolm X, which was the context of "blacks") are the same as whites, except for color. You'd have to work far harder to design a test/poll where they scored/answered the same than one where they scored differently.

It is apparent from reading the article that he is a flaming racist though.

I didn't go through the entire economics article, but at the very top, he's using incalculable to refer to the calculator not having the necessary inputs, which Turing wouldn't disagree with. "What is the best amount of sweetener to put in my tea?" is a calculable question if you know my taste preferences, or even my entire molecular structure, but it's unanswerable without that. Does he mangle the concept later?

I am not 100% sure population wide race IQ differences (so much as they even exist) are a real effect showing something about genetics rather than something else.... and even if they are, I hardly think that it makes sense to say that black people are totally different from white people because of IQ tests when it is trivially easy to find individual black people who are smarter than 99% of white people.

Frankly, Rothbards thinking is not just racist.... it is simply wrong. Might as well dismiss everything he says because he is white and the average white person is a moron.

Agreed

Not really true. Turing's view was that humans are just machines made of meat. If you can figure out how much sweetener to add it is by definition calculable, since you cannot do anything that is not calculable.

The biggest problem is not that he disagrees with me (or Turing), it's that he does not even mention the rigorous framework that can be used to show that Problem X is not calculable in an article designed to show that something is not calculable. It is just basic crackpottery. Like if galileo denied the Ptolemaic model but also didn't know that if you look at the sky at night there are small points of light that appear to move over time.

He didn't mention IQ tests at all there, or even "genetic inferiority" differences at all. You're putting words in his mouth (or taking his words from somewhere else and putting them in this quote.. he probably does actually believe it). He's attacking a straw man, but I don't see his statement as incorrect.


He's not using the technical definition. He's saying person A can tell you what x+y is because he knows x=2 and y=4, but person B can't answer the question- can't calculate it- because he has no way to know what x and y are. He's not actually arguing (at least at the top) anything like that 2+4=6 isn't calculable.



I think you're misisng his point and his meaning- I don't know if the argument is right or not without reading the article, but given the framework, he's likely arguing that central planning fails because it has no way to have perfect knowledge, not that if it had perfect knowledge and logical ability, it would fail anyway. The latter argument would seem bad at a glance.

wat

I have a BS in physics. Even in undergrad we did simple experiments that proved lots of quantum effects. How does he explain semi-conductors?

Whats a semi-conductor? Im a law student.

I think you are wrong on this one. If the fundamentals are flawed, it doesn't matter if you can understand derivations from it. For example, if there was some flawed counting system used to create advanced calculus from it, and there was some flaw in the very beginning assumptions, you could logically say that the advanced calculus is wrong, even if you don't understand that part. But understanding it doesn't hurt.

For example, if you had an advanced alchemist, you wouldn't need to be an alchemy expert to know he was wrong.

I think most of this stems from the Ron Paul evolution comment (which is pretty bad IMO). I don't think he's ever made strong statements on it (especially compared to what you might hear in church). Evolution when it is first explained has a lot of questions that don't make sense (species "jump" is one that sticks out). I remember a Sklansky thread where if you didn't believe in God 400 years ago you probably weren't smart, and if you did now, you probably weren't either. It's all based on knowledge. I wonder if I sat down with Ron Paul (or hopefully someone far more knowledgeable in biology than me), we could explain evolution and he might be swayed. But perhaps not.

I think it's entirely fair to judge Rothbard on economics and politics. Certainly it's not a mainstream approach, but that doesn't mean it's wrong by itself. As far as I'm concerned, it's almost like a different subject than traditional economics, so knowing details in a potentially flawed field is not terribly useful, so long as you can identify the fundamental flaws and are an expert at that level.

Wat? You mentioned the result of tests show they are different.

Does technical mean valid here?

I was just explaining to you what Turing's actual view is.... whether it is correct or not.


That is exactly what he is arguing

It is bad at a glance and gets worse the more you know and more you think about.

This. Its like claiming teologist have studied God much more than you and therefore you are wrong.

Also Ron Paul might not believe in evolution but at least he realizes 3 wars at the same time its a bad idea.

This, seriously. I mean if we didn't know ANYTHING about the guy other than his beliefs on evolution, this might be a good point, since it's probably a good proxy for overall intelligence, but considering we know ****LOADS of information about his actual policy positions, using THIS particular position as a reason to dismiss him is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

pvn,

no one is doing this. I assume Tsao isnt and im just loling at it in general.

I just disagree with this. Even if mainstream economics is flawed, it is possible to get "correct" answers to textbook problems based on internal logic assuming the theory is correct. Like I don't think you could come up with answers that were different and equally (or more) correct.


I find your statements about mainstream econ strong as well. As for Paul, I think we all agree he has an "anti-intellectual" and just plain stupid view about evolution.

Right... I think my criticisms of Rothbard ITT are fair and are not based on mainstream econ being correct.

This might be the all time best valenzuela post.

Where did I say IQ? Hypertension rates and ratio of "he be" to "he is" utterances qualify.


There's nothing wrong with his usage (at the top). Just because some group adopts a common-language term as jargon doesn't mean that normal people outside the group can't continue to use the word in the old way. It's not like he's using Abelian to refer to a noncommutative group



Ok, that's certainly bad at a glance, guess I'll have to read it all.

che is disappointed in you valenzuela

Look at parts of philosophy. You don't have to understand or be able to rederive everything every dumbass has ever concluded on a topic to show that the topic has no relationship to reality.

This is a silly notion.. unless you want to say that white people with hypertension and certain patterns of speech are totally different from the rest of us. I am not saying that it is impossible to tell a black person from a white person (looking at them is a pretty good test) but Rothabard's notion that their is some deep fundamental difference that applies to individuals is just not true.

It's not jargon... it is being completely unaware of the subject you are writing a paper on.

Yeah.... it is just simply an awful paper.

You're the one making this a much stronger statement. He didn't say totally different or deep fundamental difference. I didn't either. All that's necessary is for the black population to have characteristics (other than skin color, and to avoid the truly trivial, other than A/S/L) that are statistically distinguishable from the white population. It's pretty trivially true.. as most attacks on straw men are.

Eh, it's half jargon. He does make the distinction between incalculable in practice because it's too hard (hundreds of thousands of simulataneous equations, etc) and incalculable in theory because you simply can't know x=2 and y=4.

Even in your quote, his argument is informational- we still need to be predicting the future to be allocating production for the future, since production takes time, so knowledge of only the present is insufficient (and according to Mises this is impossible without a market.. although why we're bothering to call THAT impossible after we postulate that they know everything else, beats me). I'm not sure any part of it is "simply wrong".

Optimal allocation requires both knowledge and prediction of preferences and knowledge and prediction of production capabilities. Without a market to discover prices, you simply have to postulate that you know all of that in order to allocate. And even if you do, it's an enormously complex calculation.

Do you have a huge objection to that paragraph? Of course he took 563 pages and obfuscated what's in those three sentences, so it's unquestionably awfully written.

Transistors are made of semi-conducting materials. The idea is you apply a current (electric potential actually but same concept) to one gate of a transistor and it allows current to flow through another gate. Using chains of these in different configurations, you can create basic logic chips (AND, OR, NOR), which make computers go. W/o transistors we'd still be using vacuum tubes, and be severely limited in computing power. Semi-conductors use electron tunneling to turn on or off their gate. Electron tunneling doesn't work w/o quantum principles, and a working transistor wasn't created until we understood quantum mechanics.

(I think I got all that right. Been 20 years since college.)

I think I am making reasonable interpretations of what the writer is talking about. Not really worth going on about as the article is linked and anybody can read it for themselves



Have you read the paper yet? I am not saying that he denies information is a problem.... he is saying that even with information their is something that markets do that planners cannot do.

Oh come off it, pvn.

It's almost accepted fact that Democrats are closer to libertarians these days than Republicans.

Which party passed the Medicare prescription drug benefit? Which party passed No Child Left Behind? Yeah, the "small government" Republicans passed those pieces of legislation.

I'd say that Republicans are only slightly more anti-big government than Democrats. They talk about being for small government, but there isn't really a dimes worth of difference between the parties on these sets of issues.

Now when it comes to the other issues, the personal freedom issues, Democrats come down on the libertarian side on every issue except guns, and they're even backing down on gun control these days (at least at the national level). They know it's a losing issue. It's Democrats fighting against the UIGEA (passed by Republicans), it's Democrats fighting to eliminate federal penalties for marijuana,and it's Democrats who are the ones crusading for rights for gheys.

Yeah, we're getting all kinds of confused here. There are plenty of non-anti-intellectual libertarians, and there are plenty of intellectual libertarians. Those aren't the same thing, either, by the way. You could be an anti-intellectual intellectual, Rothbard probably qualifies.

But large swathes of the libertarian movement in the US today are at times virulently anti-intellectual, and anti-intellectuals are overwhelmingly either conservative or libertarian.