I have officially changed my position on the liberal arts in universities

[Asher]

So? I've never, ever suggested that we have to find out all of the numbers to infinite precision, or always get the right answer - but mechanisms that, to the best of our knowledge, will get us in the right ballpark of the right answer are probably preferable to arbitrary guesswork.

Given this quote, I bet if we asked people to guess the author's profession, 75% would guess correctly.

[Kuciwalker]

It's almost like you just realized there is no absolute morality.

I'm so pleased you finally understand the simple concept I've been arguing all night. Morality is a question that can only be answered by people, which reflects their upbringing, religion, philosophy, and general levels of empathy. That you like to use economics to define morality is your own philosophy -- one I find to be disturbing.

Hush, adults are talking.

[GePap]

Did their liberal arts degrees actually help them to obtain their jobs, and if so, were said jobs outside of academia?

Yes. For example, people with English degrees (which is what you have, no?) can be successful in publishing (including new media), advertising, or could get jobs like copy editor for a variety of companies that need to produce written materials - most engineers couldn't write an set of instructions intelligible to anyone else.

At the very least, if you are not adverse to travel, you could make money going overseas to teach English, given that your command of the language is better than most peoples, and knowing English well is certainly a marketable skill.

[KrazyHorse]

Kolmogorov did tons of important work in statistics, and Albie was a finance major. I've run into his stuff on actuarial exams. It was a decent bet at him having run into it.

His work in stochastic processes is more important than his work in statistics.

[GePap]

There's just no way you can objectively and categorically make ethical determinations especially as there are no objective value judgments. Who is to say that Kuci's economic welfare is any more an appropriate goal and basis for morality than Nietzsche's Will to Power?

Don't start commenting on Nietszche!

[GePap]

Concisely: no, it's not arbitary. If you approach ethics scientifically as the question of finding the smallest set of axioms that best explains our moral sentiments (with the tradeoff between simplicity and accuracy being handled in the usual Kolmogorov sense) then you should conclude that rule consequentialism (and, particularly, maximizing the happiness of a certain group of people) thoroughly explains almost all of our sentiments.

Why wouldn't an empirical examination of our moral senses be best carried out not through mathematical modelling but instead by observation of human beings and our evolutionary kin, since our moral senses are not derived logically, but emotionally?

[Kuciwalker]

Why wouldn't an empirical examination of our moral senses be best carried out not through mathematical modelling but instead by observation of human beings and our evolutionary kin, since our moral senses are not derived logically, but emotionally?

1) In practice, it is.

2) Our emotions are the object of study; more precisely, our moral sentiments. We're trying to find the simplest set of rules that explains them best. Hell, look at the practice of conducting thought experiments: these are genuine experiments! We hypothesize a rule determining "what we ought to do", then come up with a situation and ask if that rule produces something that agrees with our sentiments or disagrees with them. If a rule says we should do something that we feel strongly is wrong, then that is evidence against the rule.

[Al B. Sure!]

And yet the concept of ends justifying the means bothers a lot of people in many cases.

[KrazyHorse]

Solely because they're retards.

[GePap]

Why wouldn't an empirical examination of our moral senses be best carried out not through mathematical modelling but instead by observation of human beings and our evolutionary kin, since our moral senses are not derived logically, but emotionally?

1) In practice, it is.

2) Our emotions are the object of study; more precisely, our moral sentiments. We're trying to find the simplest set of rules that explains them best. Hell, look at the practice of conducting thought experiments: these are genuine experiments! We hypothesize a rule determining "what we ought to do", then come up with a situation and ask if that rule produces something that agrees with our sentiments or disagrees with them. If a rule says we should do something that we feel strongly is wrong, then that is evidence against the rule.

I would posit that moral sentiments are conditional and change according to the material conditions of the time, which make coming up with some set of absolutist "moral rules" a fools errand. I find human sacrifice to be immoral personally, given the amount of worth I place on an individual, but societies flourished for millennium practicing it. There is nothing intrinsically immoral about human sacrifice. Morality can't be divorced from the functioning of human groups, since I would claim that making human groups work is the point of human morality. A variety of sets of rules can get you to a stable equilibrium where the system doesn't collapse. I would acknowledge that there are some basic moral sentiments that predate our sapience as a species, basic feelings about "fairness" which is critical for a hierarchical animal seeking to finds its place, but what can be defined as fair can vary greatly.

[GePap]

Solely because they're retards.

So why do you place so much value on ideas based on the presumption that most people are rational actors?

[KrazyHorse]

Because when it comes to making decisions about their own lives average people manage to do surprisingly well, while the far more intelligent people in government manage to make surprisingly bad decisions about other people's lives.

[Asher]

far more intelligent people in government

You have to be remarkably stupid to go into the government.

[KrazyHorse]

By any objective standard they're smarter than the people they govern.

[GePap]

Because when it comes to making decisions about their own lives average people manage to do surprisingly well, while the far more intelligent people in government manage to make surprisingly bad decisions about other people's lives.

And if this is the case, why hasn't government gotten smaller over time? We have billions of peoples across the entire planet making daily decisions about their lives, decisions that most of the time not only affect their own person but the lives of others, and nowhere in the globe has all this human activity led to places where you have individuals governed by a systems with very little overall control.

I would posit that the more ability individuals have, the more their decisions about their own lives create issues for other people's lives, forcing the public sphere to play referee. People in "nanny states" are better off than people in less governed places of the world.