A summary of trickle down economic theory:

[Agathon]

Originally posted by BeBro
Is it this?

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/...inativism.html

Yep. That's a nice summary.

Actually, I wasn't being fair. I have eliminativist sympathies, but I find myself drawn to the "normativity" arguments. I still think this doesn't make much of a difference to the free will debate though since I remain a physicalist.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Sikander
I assume that philosophers are deliberately obtuse simply to keep intelligent people from finding out what they do and forcing them to provide something of value instead, or get off the dole at least. Did anyone here actually read that? It was designed expressly to not be read, there can be no other explanation.

I could read it, but then again I've done philosophy for years and I have a lot of those books (even though I'm nowhere near an expert in this field). Imagine if I started to read an engineer's manual - I wouldn't know where to start and I'd be puzzled by the jargon and equations. Same thing here.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Agathon

And here again you show your ignorance of the book. From Sokal's book (p.5.):

"We are not attacking philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general, on the contrary we feel these fields are of utmost importance"

Poor showing Michael. I'm afraid your head is bigger than your brain. There are other quotations I could have used, but that's enough to expose your fraudulent comments.

(a) Sokal has written more than one piece.

(b) What part of "most philosophy" don't you understand?

(c) It's not particularly prudent of academics to openly criticize entire fields, but Sokal's playing with the postmodernist's is pretty indicative. A given field of study also has (or fails to have) value independent of it's current lot of practitioners. A lot of good intellectual talent was probably wasted in Alchemy, as one example of a case in which the relative value of the field itself, and it's practitioners, is not the same.

(d) Of course, I, like the rest of the troglodytes who actually do things and make things work, are ignorant wretches who need the enlightment that only all those great philosophy types can provide us unworthy souls.

I might as well show up this crap for what it is. Even if human thought processes can't be captured in a deterministic framework, it still doesn't prove that determinism is false, nor does it prove that we have free will. The reason is simple, either these processes supervene on brain states or they are just brain states under a different descriptive framework (like propositional attitudes). Since brain states are physical states and are covered by physical laws, so are the states that supervene on them (albeit indirectly) or states that are identical with them.

That's about as far as your sort of argument gets. I've heard it many times before. Again, this just shows that you don't know what you are talking about.

You may as well show your ignorance of the argument. The philospher babbles on with no concept of real science about whether something is determinate or indeterminate, and ignores concepts he doesn't understand, or which are inconvenient to his framework.

The scientist, OTOH, really doesn't care if heterotic superstring theory IS reality, or if "brain states" are determinate, indeterminate, or banana. What the scientist cares about is if heterotic superstring theory allows him to make testable predictions more easily or more accurately than existing theories, or if some theory of "brain states" gives a higher degree of being able to predict behavior or to testably identify root causes for specific behaviors. It doesn't matter if it's determinate or indeterminate. It doesn't matter if "free will" really exists. It only matters if one model or another is superior in making predictions of the behavior of whatever it is you're modeling.

No, you have shown in this thread that you don't understand philosophy at all.

In 2500 years, what exactly of any real use has philosophy produced? Some entertaining reading material if you like to watch pseudointellectuals obfuscate something with twenty big words that can be explained in five small words? I guess it provides jobs in academia for "intellectuals" who can't or don't want to cut it in productive fields.

As if that is supposed to be profound. Everyone knows this. It still doesn't count as a proof of Free Will. And it suffers from the defect of being based on first person authority and we know that this is unreliable.

You're the one hung up on proving the reality or non-reality of free will. The only useful question is whether there's a better predictive model. So far, there isn't.

Either it's determined or it isn't.

Who cares? The operative question is whether it can be testably better described by one theory or another. Problems as simple as the distribution of billiard balls on a pool table after the break have been proven to be mathematically intractible, even if all variables are known to an arbitrary degree of precision. With that problem, you're dealing with the individually predictable interaction in very limited ways of less than a hundred elements. Brain function involves individually unpredictable and inconsistent interaction of billions of elements. Determinisim or indeterminism is utterly irrelevant to modeling the behavior of the brain, and by extension, human behavior. Free will is the simplest model, until the philosophobabblers who can't stand the concept load it up with meaningless baggage.

Imagine the outrage if we said the same about scientific jargon.

"Hamiltonian matrix" or "isospin" are precisely describable. "Fair" and "just" are not.

So you are a sophist. If you just want to get people to do what you want irrespective of morality or the truth then fine.

Ah, in your worldview, "morality" and "truth" regarding a particular situation have exact meanings that can be conveyed to others in a precise way?

And you've overstated it - people are usually quite reasonable most of the time - especially if you treat their opinions with respect and argue fairly with them.

So that's why the general repudiation of Marxist-Leninist doctrine always has to be described in terms of counterrevolutionary activity and external subversion by reactionaries? Because most people are "reasonable" and thus adopt your (or my, or whoever, e.g. the speaker's) worldview?

I'm surprised to see you opting for this. Old Jesus was pretty hung up on the truth (bearing false witness and all that) - I think you better pray for forgiveness.

Since when is describing as a common phenomenon "opting" for it? I'm not praising it, I'm simply pointing out it exists, and is an extremely common issue in human behavior.

The most likely scenario is that he told lies to get what he wanted.

Which you say, without any direct knowledge, on the basis of your ideology and your view of the man. A Bush fanboy would come up with a different explanation and believe it to be "the most likely scenario."

I prefer Ockham's razor. The simplest explanation is that they lied.

Not a simple explanation at all, but one that fits your ideology. Clinton went through a world of **** for lying about a blowjob. Nixon and Agnew left office in lieu of being removed for less than lying to "justify" invasion of a foreign country.

Missed the point entirely.

Mockery and missed aren't synonymous.

If you'd understood the example you would have understood that it's an example of the way that endorsing relativism leads to a collapse in meaning and rationality (as helpfully described above).

I understood the example as a strawman to equate something unequivocably "bad" (i.e. rape, i.e. forcible or coercive sexual assault) with something (different views of appropriate tax policy) that is not necessarily good or bad, but which is subject to a wide range of genuinely held (and only partly testable) beliefs as to what is most "fair" "just" "effective" or whatever is the desired outcome(s) of the policy.

I've read him - he's a sophist.

And his descriptions of human motivations and human behavior are quite valid.

This is exactly the sort of bad philosophy that Sokal detests. You even have a bad metaphor (filtering) to hide the fact that you don't really know what you mean.

Filtering isn't a metaphor, it's a very real process although you can feel free to give it whatever name you like - the brain simply does not have the capability of processing all sensory input it receives, nor does it have the capability of remembering all input it processes, even important input. Some of the filtering is instinctive and autonymous (most sensory input), some of it is prejudicial (studies with faked crimes and testing witness memory have shown this again and again), some of it is simple overload - not many people read a 400 page book and recall every piece of information in it. The inefficiency of "cramming" as a study method is an example.

Yet people manage to have reasonable discussions every day. They manage to do this because there are shared rules, which are inescapable if one is to say anything at all. We spend the majority of our time following shared rules - imagine what life would be like if we didn't.

Of course - most of our day to day discussions don't involve complex concepts, they don't involve great risk or cost to us, and they don't involve great levels of emotional attachment.

When you get to someone trying to talk you into an investment, someone figuring out whether a guy or girl likes them, discussions of the value of philosophy , public policy, whether "the rich" (whoever they are) are a bunch of slackers who've done nothing to earn what they have, shafting "the poor" (whoever they are) and stealing the fruit of the efforts of "the poor", THEN you get problems.

I.e., as soon as the discussion has some definite impact, risk, or emotional content, disagreement and misunderstanding become much more common.

Well, if you'd bothered to look them up, you would see that they are three different attempts to give an account of free will. Of course, only one of them can be right.

Whoosh, there goes that point sailing over your head. Endless arguments and mental circle-jerks over ways to describe the "reality" of free will are meaningless, because the "reality" of free will is itself meaningless. What matters is if the model, theory, assumption, whatever you want to call it, of free will, (i.e. individually chosen behavior) is a better working model for how and why humans do things than some other model. If you come up with some better model for predicting behavior, then great for you, and the world will start using it. The underlying reality of it doesn't matter, only the predictive ability.

Nope. I don't think so. If you think that consistency just boils down to whatever an individual thinks is consistent then you end up with relativism (consistency is relative to each individual). Since logical consistency is the core of rationality, this amounts to saying that reason is relative.

Of course you could admit that consistency is not what each individual thinks it is in which case I win this point.

This again gets to the underlying reality vs. predictive model issue. You still have to deal with human behavior. If someone (say, Bush, Wolfowitz, et al) have a sincere belief that their behavior is consistent, and they act on that belief, what is more important: Whether or not they actually are consistent (according to your biases, objectively, whatever), or whether you can use their historic behavior, knowledge or their world view, and their concept of what is consistent to predict their future behavior?

I don't care about "reality," or whether it's objective, subjective, or banana. I care about being able to predict outcomes with a reasonable and quantifiable degree of accuracy and make choices based on those predicted outcomes.

Anyway, that's enough from me. I've wasted a large amount of time giving accounts of things any good first year student learns. I've got better things to do.

Never mind - you can go back to giving Kidicious a hard time (although he is to be commended for his persistence).

I think it was David Halberstam who suggested a good strategy for Johnson in the Vietnam war was to basically go in, fight one big fight somewhere, say "we won," regardless of the result, hold a parade in downtown Saigon, and then get the hell out of Dodge, all the while proclaiming your great victory.

At least someone seems to believe in that strategy.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Back to minimum wage - do you think there would be a benefit, or not, to raising the minimum wage to, say, $15.00 an hour?

I don't know about $15/hr right off the bat, but yes. It has to do with the elasticity of demand for labor. Higher wages can actually stimulate more employment.

[MichaeltheGreat]

[Colon™]

[Japher]

now I know your out of your mind, Kid

[MichaeltheGreat]

Well, he's right....

It would create a lot of demand for Mexican labor.

[Japher]

I amke 60k as a fry chef at McDonalds, my Doctor makes 5 cents a patient! Wow, did he pick the wrong field to go into

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Well, he's right....

It would create a lot of demand for Mexican labor.

So you agree that it will stimulate demand. The only problem you have with it is cheap imports. If it stimulates demand it's because it increased the total pay recieved by labor.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Kidicious
I don't know about $15/hr right off the bat, but yes. It has to do with the elasticity of demand for labor. Higher wages can actually stimulate more employment.

I don't know what you're smoking but I want some.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Kidicious


I don't know about $15/hr right off the bat, but yes. It has to do with the elasticity of demand for labor. Higher wages can actually stimulate more employment.

Now that we're done abusing you, here's my point to the question.

You picked one factor (which you liked), while exluding others - i.e. the cost advantage to offshore competition, or to moving operations offshore, increased costs of production reducing profits (and thus capital available for investment), decline in sales due to higher costs passed on to consumers, the inflationary effect of increased dollars chasing the same quantity of services, etc.

Decreasing the minimum wage wouldn't have a clear benefit either, because the same factors come into play from the opposite side - labor cost savings and improved marginal costs compared to foreign competitors would be offset by increased defaults on debt, declining consumer demand, etc.

There's no simple "this is good" or "this is bad" answer to economic policy choices. Believing that there are such simple good or bad answers is a shared fallacy of both the hard right and the hard left, only the details are different.

[DAVOUT]

When you disconnect the macroeconomy from the micro economy, you can believe almost anything, even that increasing the salaries by an act of authority will increase employment although it will result in excluding from the market the lowest qualified workers. A good exercize is to look into a balance sheet and a P&L account and try to understand how it works, from a company point of view.

[Dinner]

There may not be good or bad but there most certainly is optimal and sub-optimal. The hard part if figuring out where that optimal point is.

[Imran Siddiqui]

What a riot!