Liberty

One doesn't go without the other. That's like saying that the heterosexual act is an abomination, but that heterosexuals are just fine. They can be heterosexuals, they just can't ever do anything about it. Does that make sense to you? In the same way that being hetero means you are attracted to the opposed sex and that sometimes (if you're lucky) that leads to sex, being gay means you are attracted to the same sex and that sometimes (if they're lucky) it leads to sex. Being gay is like being a man or a woman or black or white, it's not something you choose. Saying that gays are fine but that the gay acts are abominable is like saying that women are fine but that menstruating is an abomination, or that being a man is fine, but having an erection is abominable. It's blaming people for who they are.

I'm not sure I follow you. Are you saying you believe that humans were created whole, and that they originated with Adam and Eve (presumable a few thousand years ago)? If that's the case, I think we'll have to agree to disagree and leave it at that, because I don't feel this will be a very fruitful discussion.

So from that I'm getting that you either believe that there's a god that created gays just to mess with them, or that gays are heteros who just choose to be gay, or that people don't have a 'default' sexuality but must choose one. Is that correct? Which one is it? I'll also point out that you just called gays abominable, a pretty hateful term. Statistically speaking, there are bound to be many gays reading you on this forum.

If you look at the evidence, it is. There are gay people, gay animals. It has evolved. It can either have evolved as a primary adaptation or be the side effect of another adaptation, but however it happened, it did. Otherwise we wouldn't find all these gay people and animals all around the world through the ages. You don't have to know why humans have exactly the variety of hair colors that they do (why not other colors? Why did evolution pick those?) to see that it's what we got. The 'why' might be obvious or obscure, but the end result is the same. Once you've got that, the question is: If you were gay, how would you want to be treated? Then treat gays exactly like that. In that hypothetical scenario, with only two humans in the whole world being of the same sex, it wouldn't have started. But I don't see how that's relevant since things didn't happen that way and it's not like that situation is likely to happen now.

I finished reading the piece today. Very interesting, and Soros is obviously wicked smart. But if I try to boil it all down to fundamentals, he's basically saying that a way must be found to monetize the debt of debtor nations (either with Germany on board via higher inflation, or be having Germany leave and then have the rest devaluate). Is this the central point he's making, or did I misunderstand something?

So you figured that by creating another thread about this there would be less attention drawn to it? :)

I guess that's not impossible, but I find that improbable because of the way it was worded. If it was in response to a single thing by a single poster, it would have been a lot clearer than the blanket statements made here. But I can't read minds, so I can't be sure. Oh well, I said what I had to say on that.

Before going any further, I gotta ask: Why is any of this important? Pretty much everything we do goes against what would happen in nature. We build houses, we find cures for diseases, we cook food, drive cars, use contraceptives, watch TV and listen to recorded music, read books, wear clothes, have weapons to kill predators and each other, fly in planes, wear glasses, get surgery with anesthetics, take antibiotics and do large scale agriculture of species that have been selectively bred over generations to be molded to our needs, etc. So why is it suddenly so bad if something isn't how it would be in nature? Do you live in a cave? Not that homosexuality isn't natural, as it's found in lots of other species, as well as humans (those who think it's a choice are funny; did they choose to be heterosexual? And if it was a choice, who would make that choice when it's so much harder to live like that? Maybe those that had to force themselves to make the choice and constantly claim it's a choice (such as preacher Ted Haggard) are actually just repressed homosexuals who don't realize that real heterosexuals don't have to choose, that they are just naturally attracted to the other sex). The fact is, homosexual have kids; lots of gay men are in the closet and have kids with women, and lots of gay women live with men and have kids. They also share genes with their sibblings and help increase the chances of survival for nephews and nieces. They're part of the gene pool. But it's also very possible that straight parents have gay kids. It's only recently that more have come out of the closest to live strictly with the other sex, but they've always been there, as documented in ancient roman times and greeks and such. People who love each other and aren't hurting anyone. A total non-issue to me.

What has this to do with racemize and myself? Do you now believe in collective responsibility for what others say? There's no hive mind on this forum.

1) Yes, I want my point of view heard, which is why I explain my reasoning in a calm and civil manner. I have nothing to be ashamed about. 2) It doesn't matter how smart people are, they can say things that are untrue. I'm sure you agree with this in the investment field, and it's the same thing when it comes to metaphysics (especially for people who were alive hundreds of years ago before the scientific method and academic freedom). All that matters (and I mean all) when it comes to determining if something is true is the evidence for it and the soundness of the logic. You could have Einstein tell you that the sky is green because of fairies, and the evidence would still be against him, and you could have the village idiot say that 1+2=3 and it would still equal 3. 3) Appealing to authority will never convince me anymore than someone saying that Alan Greenspan or the creators of EMT were smart and distinguished so they must've known what they were doing and thus be right. Besides, I can also find distinguished and smart people who believe what I'm saying and appeal to their authority. What then? Should we compare the resumés of the distinguished people on each side and whoever has the most prestige gets to determine what reality is? No. We can only figure out what reality is by looking at the evidence and testing falsifiable hypotheses. 4) If I and other posters had been writing about things that support your point of view, I doubt you would be writing this. You are attacking us ad hominem by implying we're arrogant and extremists because you disagree with us. That's unfair and frankly I resent it. All I ever did is explain my point of view on various topics and spell out why I disagree with certain claims made in this thread. That's what rational civilized people do. Extremists and fundamentalists try to stop discussion and obscure facts, not promote discussion and point to facts.

Thank you!

They're not hard to find, but if I named any you'd say they're an exception or not significant or whatever, so it's pointless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman). But I wasn't talking about them, merely that we must not confuse what is desirable with what is true and vice versa, because that's an error of logic.

1) Something being desirable and something being true are two completely separate things. Maybe it would be really cool if Santa Claus was real, but that doesn't make him exist. I'd argue that all that is desirable about christianity or other religions could be had without the magic and superstition, and that all that is undesirable about it in great part offsets the desirable stuff anyway. 2) People with all kinds of beliefs have committed atrocities over human history, and trying to pin this on atheists is ridiculous on its face to anyone who knows any history. And if you research the supposed atheism of people like Stalin, you'll find that they gave ridiculous reasons and pretty much just wanted total power so they had to get the very powerful church out of the way. It wasn't about principle so much as a power struggle between two competing institutions. Communists didn't want to share power over people's lives with anyone, including churches, so they created their own secular religion with very similar cults of personality and such. But yeah, being an atheist doesn't make you automatically a good person anymore than being a christian or a muslim. I think that's pretty obvious. 3) Without religion-inspired dark ages like medieval times, chances are that we'd be hundreds of years ahead in knowledge. Religious leaders made us take big steps back from the ancient greeks and romans in the name of their truths, similar to what they did more recently in Afghanistan. At a point, the whole of Europe was basically under the then-taliban's power, the most religious people you could ever find, and that didn't turn out so well..

Here's another interview: Here's a note I made in my "rationality quotes" document based on the interview: Definitely applies to investing. Going back to fundamental principles when reasoning can help avoid herd-like behaviour.

One thing I would recommend to people considering reading this book (or who have already read it) is to keep in mind the halo effect: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/the-halo-effect-phil-rosenzweig/ And make sure that these champions are doing well because of certain characteristics, and not that these positive characteristics are imputed to them because they're doing well. Getting the causality right is very hard.

I don't really have an opinion specifically about him, and I've stated my position on the generalized idea in a previous post. Maybe over a beer someday ;)

Btw, the argument from "look, this distinguished scientist believes in god" is meaningless because: 1) Things exist or not regardless of who believes in them. It's the validity of the argument in favor that matters, not who provides it (in the same way that a lot of things that Einstein proposed late in his careers weren't accepted automatically by other scientists just because Einstein said it, they had to verify the evidence). If I see new evidence coming from that scientist, then that'll be something worth considering, but if it's still all the same old hand-waving, then it doesn't matter. 2) If you consider that this one scientist has weight, then you must not cherry pick and take into account the whole picture. And the whole picture is that the vast majority of high level scientists (especially those who study fields that are 'related' to life and the universe, like physics and biology) are either atheists or agnostics. So even that argument from authority isn't in favor of the supernatural.

Pascal's wager IS garbage because whether you believe in the supernatural or not should lead you to lead your life very differently. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The only reason people think Pascal's wager is any good is a deferral to authority: he's an old dead guy with a great reputation for being smart, so what he said must be right, yea? But if you actually think about it and putting it in practice in your life rather than just superficially in the abstract, it falls apart. If I thought there was the smallest chance that I could be tortured forever in a place called hell, I'd follow every damn thing the bible says to the letter and would probably live like an hassidic jew or whatever (or like a good hindu, etc.. depending). That's a very different life. It's also a question of intellectual honesty and of deciding when to stop. If you don't see evidence for a god, why try to fool yourself into believing just in case? And then, how do you decide which god you should believe in and what prescriptions you should follow? It's not like everything all religions say is compatible (otherwise they wouldn't have killed each other for so long). And why pick the christian god? If random chance had made you born in india, would you be an hindu? Or maybe a muslim in Saudi Arabia? Or a buddhist in Japan? Or a zulu in Africa? How about a pascal wager where you claim to believe in thor and zeus too just in case? Why limit it to religion? How about a pascal wager just in case ghosts exist, or fairies, or werewolves? You never know... Besides, how do you know that f there's a god, he wouldn't prefer a sincere atheist who says "I just didn't see any evidence for it" to someone who claims to believe to hedge their bets? Meh, Pascal's wager is a weak mind game, and certainly doesn't count as evidence of anything except the human power or rationalization. I bet that if Pascal had been born today and had been showed all that science has done in the past 300 years, he might have a different opinion anyway... I'll never hold it against a bronze age or medieval peasant* to believe in all kinds of weird things. Human curiosity is such that it isn't comfortable to not know, so we make things up. We'd rather believe in something improbable without evidence than not know something. But that doesn't make those things true, and today people have a lot less excuses than a medieval peasant, because we have the method and the tools to figure out how things work. *This reminds me of a book written by Le Ly Hayslip, a poor vietnamese peasant during the vietnam war. I was really impressed by all the superstitions that peasant have about ghosts all around their villages, and ancestors visiting them in dreams, and having to get a psychic before buying a house to ask ghosts about stuff, and building shires in the right place and such. Science doesn't have to explain the universe fully for any god to be proven not to exist. It's the other way around: The burden of proof is on religion to show evidence for the existence of god. Burden of proof is always on the person making a positive claim. If there's no evidence for something, there's no reason to believe it exists. If astrophysicists claim there's a black hole somewhere close, they have to show evidence for it. It's not: "if you can't prove there's no black hole, then there is one!" Even if science only explains 0.0001% of the universe, that has no implication on deities, unless in that 0.00001% we find evidence for one or many deities.

Thanks for posting, James.

No, for me, I am going to view them as good or evil from the context of my social unit. Similarly, Bush is a good moral man to some Christians and to others (families of civilians bombed in Pakistan) he may be viewed as a cruel evil man. But overall, in the grand scheme of things, there is no difference, right? If we remove our own biases, they are both equally good and/or/nor bad? They are relative and there is nothing absolute about them? Eric, I'm still waiting for your response here. Honestly, I really value your opinion and I'd like to know if what I'm assuming is true for you. I may not be able to answer. It's reductio ad absurdem, yet you may not be incorrect. It's a bit like that common question about whether the sound of a tree falling exists without somebody around to experience it. Perhaps my social nature is preventing me from seeing anything without a measure of social value ascribed to it. Ethics and morals are a whole other discussion which I don't want to get into, but if either of you is interested, this is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarism

You ask why, I ask why not? :) Most times I don't feel it's worth it and would agree with you, but on this board I feel like people are civil and smart enough that some interesting things can come out of such a discussion. But I mostly just like to set the record straight when it comes to erroneous scientific claims, though that often gets dragged into more metaphysical stuff, which I find less interesting. Oh well. I think these threads are rare enough here that they are easy to ignore by people who aren't interested. I certainly am not pushing for more of these off-topic discussions, but I guess once in a long while isn't too terrible.

Not that it matters one iota because history has shown that people with all kinds of metaphysical beliefs can do evil things (though through most of history that was religious people because most people were religious, and because religion was a great justification to dehumanize and kill the "infidels" on the other side or to de-responsabilize yourself by saying "let's do it because god told me to" or "god is on our side"), but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_religious_beliefs He even made speeches against atheism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_religious_beliefs#Statements_against_atheism

The key word here is "unnecessary". That's not the same as claiming to have proven a negative. It just means that the models of reality work just fine without having to postulate for a god. Like occam's razor. It says that if you have two explanations for something, ceteris paribus the simplest one is probably true. In other words, you should remove unnecessary complexity and go with the simpler (thus more probable) explanation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor For example, imagine we found a computer microprocessor from an alien species and had no idea how it worked. There's a group that studies it in detail and comes up with hypotheses about how it works, and then it tests them and sees if they were right or wrong. Over time, after many experiments they accumulate lots of knowledge about the alien CPU and they know how it works. Then there's a second group that says: "yeah, it works just like how the first group says, except that it also works using undetectable magic". Occam's razor would slice off the magic because it is unnecessary. The first explanation was sufficient in itself to explain the observed data, the magic was superfluous, or unnecessary. Another way to understand this is via the conjunction fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy

In this case, I didn't mean "blind faith" as "just a wild ass guess", but rather because gold doesn't produce anything, you kind of have to hope that someone else will buy it at a higher price later. So you need to have faith that it will act in the way you think it will act based on past performance (and even that is a mixed bag, as the correlation isn't always obvious). With a productive asset, you can look at what it produces and know that this will come out of it over time and estimate the value of that. You know apple will produce iphones this year, but 1oz of gold at the end of the year will be exactly the same as at the beginning of the year, so it's more a leap of faith if you are to consider it as an investment or even a store of value. As I said, I think it will probably work as expected, but I certainly can't be sure of that... (not that we can be so sure about fiat money either, which complicates things). But right now I feel more sure about quality businesses than either of those, so that's where I invest. As for Rothbard and Mises, I've read some of both (and others). I actually have the three volume edition of Mises' Human Action and Jörg Guido Hülsmann's biography of Mises. I've read a lot of the pro-gold books (Michael Maloney, etc) to see the arguments first hand. I've even listened to a bunch of King World News and Sprott Global podcasts with Sprott and Rick Rule and all the regular guests, the GATA stuff, London trader, etc. I've done the research. Don't assume that I'm not entirely convinced like you out of ignorance.

Indeed, that's my conclusion too. I actually own shares in a business that sells picks & shovels (so to speak) to the mining industry and should do very well if precious metals (as well as base metals and other commodities) do well. I've also got a bunch of precious metal royalty/streaming companies on my watchlist, including those you mentioned, though I haven't bought any (I prefer other things, and they're harder to value than that service company I bought). Since I don't ever hold that much cash for very long (that's a weakness of mine, I like to be almost fully invested when things I like get cheap enough), I don't fear the devaluation of my cash too much and feel that most of what I own should have decent to good pricing power in inflationary environments. At some point I considered getting some silver bullion, but I ended up buying more shares of a business I liked instead. We'll see if that was a good decision over time..