From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Mon Apr 12 11:34:15 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA06022; Mon, 12 Apr 93 11:34:12 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA22615; Mon, 12 Apr 93 11:34:01 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu (5.65/4.0) id ; Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:21:40 -0400 Message-Id: <9304121821.AA05417@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: ExI-Daily@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:21:12 -0400 X-Original-Message-Id: <9304121821.AA05407@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu> X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0189 X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on April 12, 373 P.N.O. [18:21:39 UTC] Reply-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: OR Extropians Digest Mon, 12 Apr 93 Volume 93 : Issue 0189 Today's Topics: America's Intelligence? [1 msgs] American Intelligence [1 msgs] EXTROPY: Seven more copies spotted [2 msgs] Economic systems [1 msgs] Enlightening Dale [1 msgs] FORWARD: Economic Systems, part 2 (200 lines) [1 msgs] FTL: traversable wormholes [1 msgs] FTL: traversable wormholes (was HUMOR: UFO's from future?) [2 msgs] LAW: Employment contracts [1 msgs] Libertarians accepting govt. $ ? [1 msgs] META/IQ: Inviting someone to shoot me if I've been an asshole [1 msgs] Metanational services [1 msgs] Organizations [1 msgs] Priorities [1 msgs] SAT scores [1 msgs] Sex and Free Love [1 msgs] thinking isn't what you think it is [1 msgs] Administrivia: This is the digested version of the Extropian mailing list. Please remember that this list is private; messages must not be forwarded without their author's permission. To send mail to the list/digest, address your posts to: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu To send add/drop requests for this digest, address your post to: exi-daily-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu To make a formal complaint or an administrative request, address your posts to: extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu If your mail reader is operating correctly, replies to this message will be automatically addressed to the entire list [extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu] - please avoid long quotes! The Extropian mailing list is brought to you by the Extropy Institute, through hardware, generously provided, by the Free Software Foundation - neither is responsible for its content. Forward, Onward, Outward - Harry Shapiro (habs) List Administrator. Approximate Size: 52674 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 11 Apr 93 21:48:13 EDT From: drw@BOURBAKI.MIT.EDU Subject: FORWARD: Economic Systems, part 2 (200 lines) I ran into the following essay on alt.revolution.counter, and I thought that it was rather interesting in the context of the economic systems essay and the general topics of discussion on this mailing list. Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Subject: Sex and Free Love Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1993 12:28:56 GMT Things have gotten slow in this newsgroup lately, even with religious arguments, so I thought I would say something about sex. After all, the latest issue of _Chronicles_, a leading paleoconservative publication, has a picture of a naked woman on the cover. (Some might call it a photograph of a female nude in bronze, but that art stuff cuts no ice with me.) What I wrote is long-winded and abstract enough to satisfy all you Spengler fans, but maybe not many others. If anyone wants to read it, though, I would be interested in comments. Liberation In this country the movements for women's liberation and for the relaxation of traditional sexual morality have made remarkable progress without serious opposition. Such success exemplifies the serious practical consequences in America today of the poverty of thought on morality and social issues and the progressive expansion of egalitarianism and hedonism. How men and women can live together happily and productively is a basic problem in social organization. The well-being of both sexes and their ability to raise children successfully depends upon the solution to this problem. If, as women's liberation demands, the relation between men and women is to be based on the elimination of socially-recognized sex roles, the problem becomes insoluble. If there are no set sex roles, so that a man and a woman as such have no special rights and obligations regarding each other, their relations are their private affair. They can have dealings with each other or not as they choose, and the terms on which they deal are determined by mutual consent. Traditional family arrangements, which brought with them extensive and unavoidable duties, are replaced by private agreements to cooperate as to particular aspects of one's life. In other words, something like a free market obtains in relations between the sexes. In such a free market, it is imprudent to stake much upon agreements regarding sexual matters because they can't be enforced. Agreements regarding economic matters are enforceable because the interests of the parties can be reduced to money, which provides a standard for determining the intent of the parties and the appropriate remedy when the agreement is breached. In sexual and family life, however, objectively determinable interests and purposes are so interwoven with those that are subjective and personal that determining what the parties agreed on and the appropriate remedy for a breach is usually quite difficult. The consequence is that that after liberation relations between men and women become distant. Since it takes a rare degree of faith to treat something wholly private as real, people in general no longer rely on such relationships. In the economic sphere the free market requires participants to deal with each other at arm's length and to exercise shrewdness and self-reliance to avoid being taken advantage of. In the sphere of sexual and family relations the free market requires yet more distrust, because the disappearance of the publicly enforceable element in sexual relationships means that such relationships last only as long as both parties wish them to last, and people's wishes change. The attachment between mother and child is an exception to the rule that family attachments disappear after liberation. Children are incapable of independence, and mothers have a natural attachment to their children that is reinforced by the child's dependency. Liberation causes this relationship to deteriorate, however. Since in an egalitarian society there is no social support for unconditional relationships with other people, a mother has no grounds for thinking that her child will maintain an attachment to her when he no longer needs her, and feels exploited because she is giving her love unconditionally and has no grounds to expect the like in return. She may react to such painful feelings by anger against the child, by withdrawal, or by attempting to make the relationship permanent (perhaps by incapacitating the child for independence). Each alternative is bad for the child. The difficulties of raising children are made worse by the distance or absence of the child's father, which will be the norm in a sexually free and equal society. A father's connection to his child is initially indirect. In the past a father might have been tied to his child by a web of social relations, or more concretely by his need for a helper in his business or desire for heirs; today the tie is through the mother. If that relationship is broken easily, for practical purposes the child will lack a father. If the child is a boy he will grow up without a model for how he can contribute to society. Whether a boy or girl, the child will not grow up in a domestic order embracing two adults and so will have no intimate experience of objective moral standards. Accordingly, he is likely to find it hard to participate in community or to form relationships based on mutual respect. As a result, relations between the sexes and between parents and children will sink over time into what one would expect among people who have no respect for themselves or others. The degradation of sexual life brought about by the circumstances of family life just discussed is aggravated by the ordinary effects of a free market. A free market is based on participants choosing freely in accordance with the tastes that they happen to have. To reject the free market as an ideal is to reject the view that all tastes are equally valid and therefore to reject egalitarianism. To accept it is to accept the tastes people have -- their consumer preferences -- as an ultimate standard that requires no justification. The natural effect of such an ideal is self-seeking hedonism. If my tastes, whatever they may be, are beyond criticism by others, they are also beyond my own criticism, and the only ground for my choices is my immediate pleasure. Also, the normal effect of a free market is to diversify tastes, to increase aggregate consumption, and to increase the importance placed on consumption generally, while making taste cruder and reducing the significance of particular acts of consumption and of the manner of consumption. Extended to sexual relations, the free market thus eliminates intellectually the categories of sexual license and perversion while fostering the conduct that would fall into such categories if they still existed. It makes sex incapable of functioning as a sustaining part of a durable bond between men and women. Since sexual liberation and egalitarianism damage or destroy the family, the repair of the family requires that relations between the sexes be governed by the principle that it is right to treat men and women as differing in nature -- that is, in accordance with authoritative sex roles -- and both social custom and legal institutions should conform to that requirement. Since sex roles are necessary for a tolerable society and in most cases correspond to the characteristics individual members of each sex in fact possess, by nature and nurture, the fact that they do not fit some people is not a sufficient reason for rejecting them. The details of such roles will vary in accordance with circumstances. Objections to truly outmoded sex roles can be accommodated, but the basic features will continue to be be the traditional ones based on the innate differences that in general distinguish the sexes. For example, women are generally better adapted to caring for small children. They carry and give birth to the baby, and in the natural course of things nurse it during the first months of life, and so have a necessary physical connection to the child. The emotional effect of this connection is heightened by women's diffuse sensuality, which is engaged by the baby and by the close physical contact of tending and nursing it. Women's responsiveness to immediate feeling and sensation and the vagueness of their sense of themselves as persons separate from those they love further enhances their sympathy for small children. This special relationship to small children readily grows into a special responsibility for the home in general as the setting for the immediate and intimate relations in which both women and children tend to feel in their element. Conversely, men tend to be more interested in the instrumental than the immediate, and their relations to others tend toward a mixture of competition and cooperation that suits the marketplace. Since it is less characteristic of men to take pleasure in immediate personal relationships than pride in protecting those who rely on them, they are more suited to be the ultimate authority in the family as well as its breadwinner and primary representative to the public world. Such a restoration of traditional sex roles has its difficulties. Sex presents vividly the contradiction in man's nature as animal and as rational agent, and the dogma of sexual equality eliminates the difficulty of thinking about sex by eliminating thought. Also, the decline in the immediate economic and social importance of family relationships makes it easier to avoid thinking about the difficulties created by sexual freedom and equality, and a democratic consumer society takes short views. Nonetheless, there are contradictions within the revolution against traditional sex roles that would facilitate their restoration. Like other people, feminists recognize that women are fundamentally different from men and this recognition has become increasingly explicit recently. Only feminist illogic and the difficulty of rational thought about questions relating to basic social organization have preventing wide recognition that different roles for men and women are appropriate. For example, we have seen that the well-being of mothers is inconsistent with formal equality of rights between the sexes and freedom in their dealings with each other. In addition, the rise of pornography and sexual harassment as feminist issues demonstrate an increasingly explicit awareness that such formal liberty and equality can hurt women. Monogamy, and sexual restraint generally, is more egalitarian in substance than sexual freedom but will not exist unless marriage is binding, which it can not be unless it is thought of as the union of two different sorts of person that need each other to form a complete whole. Moreover, the government can contribute to a restoration simply by ceasing to undermine traditional sex roles. Anti-discrimination measures, and the welfare state generally, are intended (among other things) to make women economically independent of particular men and therefore to help realize the goals of women's liberation. Abandonment of such measures would contribute to a better life for all by helping knock the props out from under the illusion of equality. The rejection of liberation in sexual matters may also be aided by popular rejection of egalitarianism and hedonism on account of their inability to give people what they really want. In addition to more direct effects the recognition of such inability may have, it is likely to prompt a search for and eventual acceptance of transcendental values as authoritative. If transcendental values are taken seriously, people will be less likely to view the working world -- the organized production and distribution of publicly recognized and transferable goods -- as the sole source of dignity, and something like their traditional and necessary roles are likely to become more palatable to men and women. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 2:28:41 MDT From: J. Michael Diehl Subject: American Intelligence > 7) As my measured IQ is right at the threshold where the tests become > unreliable, I'll probably never know very precisely where I sit on the bell > curve. My own guess had been that my actual IQ was around 155, based on > comparisons with IQs I've seen attributed to various well-known people. You are assuming that you know the difference between a 155 and a 150 IQ. Also, how do you "compare" yourself with "various well-known people?" This is the scientific test to beat all scientific test! Why don't you take your measured IQ, accept it, and be happy. My IQ is also fairly high, but there is one thing that we must remember: Having a higher IQ doesn't make one person better than another. > Accordingly, I told her that I'd guessed I was somewhere between 145 and 160 Ouch! For that area of the normal curve, that is a large range! Almost like saying, "I'm between 20 and 50 years old!" > (what I now know is the three- to four-sigma range). She laughed and said > that was probably way low, a reaction I found more than a bit surprising (and, > yes, gratifying). She's not the type to flatter. I'm not EVEN going to touch this one.... ;^) +----------------------+----------------------------------------------------+ | J. Michael Diehl ;-) | I thought I was wrong once. But, I was mistaken. | | +----------------------------------------------------+ | mdiehl@triton.unm.edu| "I'm just looking for the opportunity to be | | Thunder@forum | Politically Incorrect! | | (505) 299-2282 | | +----------------------+----------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 3:51:45 PDT From: rjones@agora.rain.com (Robert Jones) Subject: Metanational services Greetings Extropians, Great list ya got here! It's getting close to statist robbery witching hour here in the U.S. It's high time we figured out a way around the nonsense -- market methods to keep our money away from the government and put it to more productive uses. I highly recommend the March 26 Forbes article, "Digital Capitalism". One of the schemes described therein is a synthetic security that performs as well as the German stock market yet incurs no German witholding t*xes. The German t*x system is intended to reward German investors for holding stocks while penalizing foreigners for holding stocks. Typical dim-witted protectionism, crying out to be cracked. Both Germans and foreigners want international diversifiction. The mechanism for making both sets of investors happy is the DAX 30 Index future traded in Frankfurt. A German corportation that doesn't want to own shares of other German companies may nonetheless buy $1 million worth, then hedge away the equity exposure by shorting $1 million worth of the DAX 30. The German shareholder gets the t*x benefit that flows to a corporate investor but none of the risk. Now suppose a U.S. pension fund wants to own $1 million of German stocks. It can profitably lend out its shares to short-sellers without reducing its exposure to the German stock market. All we need to complete the loop is a brokerage. It borrows shares from the U.S. pension fund, promising to replace them someday and to refund the lost dividends. The brokerage sells these shares to Germans who want to be record owners but don't want the attendant equity risk. Those German holders hedge their purchases by shorting DAX 30 futures. The brokerage goes long on the futures at the same instant it shorts the German stocks. The loot to be divvied up is the German t*x benefit, and each of the three players gets a piece of it. For the cost of a few network transactions, one idiotic statist intervention down the tubes! I'd like to reduce the transaction costs of such schemes to the point where Mr. & Mrs. middle class can afford them, starving Uncle Sam into submission regardless of how many welfare cases the statists can bribe into voting for them with your t*x $$$. Operating in a secure meta-nationalist framework, we may be able to implement the following: * T*x audit insurance: The metanational insurance company discretely "pre-audits" your return, determines the risk of an audit, and pays either a fixed sum or penalties if you get audited. Premium services might include bail money and incarceration insurance (pays off $X for every day the customer must stay in prison), or discrete international relocation if the customer chooses that instead of prison. To further spread the risk, an "audit futures" market could be set up to anticipate IRf*ckingS auditing patterns. With the risk taken out of auditing, the 50% of Americans who cheat on their t*x returns need not feel shy about taking such action to any degree desired. If the cost of auditing and enforcement becomes a major fraction of the cost of the market system, net t*x revenues go way down. If the cost of auditing & enforcement exceeds the cost of the insurance market, the t*x system is effectively dead. Meanwhile, the t*xpayers and their audit insurers divvy up the $100's of billions that would have gone to D.C. bureacrats. * Metanational information services contracting network: cryptographically secure international telecommuting for information workers. This works in cases where the loss of value from face-to-face contact is less than the t*x savings (often 20-40% for typical middle class) minus the transaction costs (net time + amortize the software development, legal etc. costs). As a very rough estimate, the t*x bite on U.S. information workers is over $100 billion per year. This is enough to pay for dozens of new transoceanic satellites and fiber optic cables _every year_, plus moving and providing luxury for thousands of the best hackers, lawyers, mercs, etc. to implement the scheme from secure distributed physical sites ("Oceania"). Comments? How can we discretely contact the folks doing this kinda stuff right now? P.S. t*x == "tix", blood-sucking parasites that spread via casual contact with government forms, Clinton/Gore soudbites, and similar unhealthy practices. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 04:56:49 -0400 (EDT) From: esr@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) Subject: META/IQ: Inviting someone to shoot me if I've been an asshole My posts on the IQ thread have included stuff about my test scores and my past status as a not-too-dumb-to-come-in-out-of-the-rain type. A certain poster who shall remain nameless except that his consonants are T*m M*y has intimated that he thinks I've been being a boastful asshole. Such was not my intention. In a list as thick with Very Bright People as this one, I figured everyone could parse such data for factuality and grok that I don't actually have a head swollen to the size of the planet Neptune. However, it is certainly possible that I've been deluding myself and that some piece of my hindbrain really wanted to spew self-glorification all over the place. Therefore, I'm inviting any member of the Polite Society (or whatever it's called this week) to shoot me like a dog if I've been being obnoxious. I won't shoot back. (Note: If I *haven't* been being an asshole, some of you weisenheimers are sure to think it would be good turnabout to shoot T*m. Please don't. He had the couth not to post his denunciamento.) -- >>eric>> ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 04:39:44 PDT From: edgar@spectrx.Saigon.COM (Edgar W. Swank) Subject: FTL: traversable wormholes (was HUMOR: UFO's from future?) I've been following with a great deal of interest the responses to my repost of Frank Tipler's letter. I'm surprised to hear that the chances of FTL are theoretically improved at the same time that those for time travel are disimproved. I seem to recall hearing that, according to relativity(?), FTL travel is -equivalent- to time travel; if you can do either you can do both. Certainly having time travel gives us FTL travel by the simple expedient of a 2-step process: Travel distance D from point A to point B at sub-light speeds taking objective time T; then travel into the past by any amount up to T. Anyway, Mike Price and others, please post more. -- edgar@spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank) SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005 Silicon Valley, Ca ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 04:38:46 PDT From: edgar@spectrx.Saigon.COM (Edgar W. Swank) Subject: America's Intelligence? It was interesting to read Duncan Frissell's post of the article by Regna Lee Wood, laying the blame for American illiteracy to the switch from phonics to "see and say". Although I expect there's a lot of truth to that, I'd be interested in Duncan's comments (or Regna's or Flesch's, if available) in the high literacy rates in Japan (for example) which does not even -have- a phonetic alphabet. (or perhaps has one but doesn't use it much). -- edgar@spectrx.saigon.com (Edgar W. Swank) SPECTROX SYSTEMS +1.408.252.1005 Silicon Valley, Ca ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 1993 09:10:26 -0500 (EST) From: KMOSTA01@ULKYVX.LOUISVILLE.EDU Subject: Economic systems Dale claims that the communist economies were reasonably successful. Only a person who knows nothing about the communist economies can make such claim (e.g., Paul Samuelson in 1980 claiming that the Soviet economy was successful, no data or knowledge to back it up, and this said in 1980, not 1930). NO success in the communist economies ever existed. During my entire life under communism in Poland 1957-1981 I never saw a single government-run bakery which could make bread equal to that provided by private bakeries (assuming bread was available, i.e., during those periods when private bakeries were allowed to exist). I traveled to the Soviet Union numerous times then and their situation was always worse. We still have idiots claiming that there was no Holocaust, that there was no genocide in Ukraine in 1930's, and that communist economies were successful. Interestingly enough, a lot of people buy the argument that Hitler's command economy was successful, and he was just nasty, while the fact is that butter was rationed, and if you not count the military output of the economy (why should you?), Hitler's GDP was dropping. Dale, are you a feds agent trying to spy on extropians, or just stupid? Krzys' ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 9:14:15 CDT From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Subject: thinking isn't what you think it is Eric S. Raymond writes, regarding logical illusions and proofs: > However, the existence of such "logical illusions" is not much of a threat > to mathematical proof, because the integrity of mathematical proof doesn't > depend very strongly on mathematicians being able to spot flaws. It depends, > rather, on their ability to apply the rules of some formal system correctly > and constructively. Were mathematics actually done that way, this would be correct, but it isn't. The formal systems that form the basis of mathematics (e.g. predicate calculus) are rarely used to prove anything of real interest to mathematicians. Pick up any math book and you'll see that the languages used to express the theorems and proofs thereof rely heavily on a common basis of well-understood conventions -- which are not anywhere formalized in the sense Eric implies. I think this was the original point being made; that because truly formal proofs are too difficult and long and tedious, mathematicians rely just like anybody else on convincing argument. If the integrity of mathematical proof really depended on the ability "to apply the rules of some formal system correctly and constructively", we'd see formal systems for all sorts of fields, with computer checking of proofs (since computers can apply rules of any formal system correctly and constructively, at blinding speed). This is almost never done. I tried to use a truly formal system to help generate and check proofs once -- in particular, the Boyer/Moore theorem prover, applied to some elementary results regarding function composition in mathematical logic. It was a nightmare. Someday, perhaps, these kind of techniques will be appropriate for representing and validating mathematical knowledge, but certainly not today. I suppose the classic reference for this (realistic) view of proof as a social, argumentative, "convincingness-motivated" process is Lakatos's 1976 book _Proofs and Refutations_. Oh, and I always thought that IQ was a ratio (quotient): (:-)) ability to solve meaningless symbolic puzzles --------------------------------------------- ability to refrain from bragging about it derek ooh, maybe at the next extropians get-together we should bring some IQ tests and have a melee -- mano a mano a mano ... ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 09:20:18 CDT From: ddfr@midway.uchicago.edu Subject: SAT scores "I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that a broader range of students take SATs in the 1990s than did in the 1960s." (Lefty, on the decline of SAT scores) This is apparently not the explanation. Some time back, there was a conference here at which I was the commenter on a paper by Sam Peltzman discussing the decline of American education; for those interested the conference papers and comments will be coming out shortly as a special issue of the Journal of Law and Economics. Sam did his best to control for things such as the change in mix of students taking the exams. His conclusion was that there was a steep drop in performance from about 1960 to 1980, with performance flat or slightly recovering thereafter. His paper, incidentally, used statistics on state by state data to try to locate the cause of the decline. He gave me access to his data, so I was able to run my own regressions in the process of doing the comment, which was fun. One possibility for which I found some evidence was that the cause was centralization. Roughly speaking, from the end of world war II to 1980 the average number of students per school district increased twelve fold. Whether this change correlates with state by state outcomes is not entirely clear, and since I was only doing a comment I did not follow it up very far. As evidence of some of the perils of statistics (correlation is not causation, especially with something like state characteristics, many of which correlate substantially with each other), I found positive correlations of educational output both with the divorce rate and the republican vote in the Goldwater and McCarthy elections (I was looking for a simple measure of ideology by state). So the way to have good schools is to get divorced and vote Republican. Sam's data could perhaps be used to test the conjecture that the problem was due to changes in how reading is taught. Are there data showing when which states introduced the new (and putatively worse) method? David Friedman University of Chicago Law School ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 09:20:32 CDT From: ddfr@midway.uchicago.edu Subject: Enlightening Dale "The reason you should read MoF is because if you don't have the background you will repeat many arguments and questions which were already answered. (and annoy list members) Think of MoF as the "anarchocapitalist FAQ"."(rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu, I think) "What I'm hoping is that people here would provide enough information" (Dale) I did. What is your objection to the printing press as a way of disseminating it? One of the main reasons for writing a book is in order not to have to explain the same things to a hundred people a hundred times. On the subject of self criticism ... . The course I am teaching this quarter is called "Solution Unsatisfactory." It is about social problems, broadly defined, for which there appears to be no good solution. As a first approximation, think of it as the intersection of market failure and political failure. I have tried to confine myself to problems where I thought a good case could be made that the market outcome was unsatisfactory, in order to avoid doing a course on "why markets are better." One of the first topics, of course, was the question of what it meant to say that a solution was unsatisfactory when you did not have a better one to propose. One benefit of teaching the course is that I got around to reading George Orwell's _Down and Out in Paris and London_, which I found interesting. I was looking for a good (i.e. honest and convincing) source on the evils of poverty without government aid, to balance the accounts of the damage done by attempts to use government to solve the problems of poverty. As a side benefit, Orwell's suggestions for improving London's (mostly private) flophouses give a perfect lead-in to a discussion of present homelessness. In effect, we took his advice--and the result was to price low income housing out of the range of the very poor (he was describing dreadful housing--available for ninepence a night in London c. 1930). On a side note--I wonder how many people on the list recognize the source of the course's title? Someone in this thread mentioned "Railroads and Regulation." The author is Gabriel Kolko. David Friedman University of Chicago Law School ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 9:27:53 CDT From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Subject: EXTROPY: Seven more copies spotted Well, this weekend I went out to the Borders book store we have in town, to indulge in petty jealousies, drink espresso, and skim without remorse -- and there on the racks there they were -- seven copies of Extropy. That's two bookstores in town (Madison WI) that carry it. This time, in a wry twist of fate, it was sandwiched between two pagan/witchcraft/mystic magazines. derek because I'm sure you all wanted to know ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 11:37:26 -0400 From: tburns@gmuvax.gmu.edu (Dave Burns) Subject: LAW: Employment contracts >From: twb3@midway.uchicago.edu (Tom Morrow) >[. . .] I will bounce back his gracious "thank you" and apologize for >mistakenly calling him Dale. No sweat. >[. . .] Common law does *not* >allow you to contract around any law. [examples elided] You're not distinguishing between common law as it has evolved and common law in the abstract. Any precedent (in the abstract) can be overthrown. In practice, this may be so unlikely as to seem impossible. Civil rulings can be contracted around. In the abstract, I believe such 'contracting around' should be extended to all rulings since judges are not perfect. Otherwise, the legislature (PPL committee?, higher court? somebody) has a monopoly on feedback. In practice, contracting around has not been extended. If law is to be a spontaneous order, nothing can be written in stone. Surely there are plenty of court rulings and legislative statutes you'd like to contract around? So the 'right to smell' society has a precedent set that smell-good clauses in employment contracts have been defeated in court. The presumption is against them, as it is against slave contracts in our society. But employers should have recourse to some mechanism (perhaps costly) if they are determined (who can blame them?) to have employees that smell good. >>[. . .] Everything seems arbitrary and up in the air. > >Exactly. That's why commonlaw doesn't work as you describe it. It doesn't, but should it? Common law was originally based on custom and voluntary interaction. Could such a system have rigidified the way it has without the influence of the state? Can anything be written in stone in a truly free society? (Oops, there's that word again. Perhaps THIS is my criterion of freedom? No, this can't be it, because nothing is ultimately written in stone anywhere. For example, take the Soviet Union, one of the stoniest stones in history.) >>[. . .] What establishes informed consent? > >The Uniform Commercial Code has widely accepted criteria for establishing >informed consent, which have been derived from common law traditions. I'm >pretty satisfied [. . .] Is that the bit at the end of the contract that states, "I swear by the life of my first-born that I've read and understood the indecipherable lawyer gobbledeygook on this contract:?" I guess I'm pretty unsatisfied. >[. . .] >>Privacy involves an ownership claim of information. > >But this works in exactly the opposite direction. If employees really had >property rights in their personal information, then they could transfer >those rights to their employers. [. . .] I didn't say that people in the 'right to smell' society made any claims about privacy. That's how somebody could formulate privacy claims in property language, that's all. Perhaps the right to smell and the right to privacy are incompatible. Perhaps right-to-smellers don't consider their odor to be private information. >[. . .] >T.O. Morrow -- twb3@midway.uchicago.edu ------------------------------------- Dave Burns tburns@gmuvax.gmu.edu 10310 Main St. #116 Fairfax, VA 22030 (703) 993-1142 Breakfast:IMPOSSIBLE ------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 11:50:57 EDT From: eisrael@suneast.East.Sun.COM (Elias Israel - SunSelect Engineering) Subject: FTL: traversable wormholes Hal Finney writes: > It seems like something similar would happen with the wormholes as they > got into causal loops. Any photon from the ancient end would travel > to the new end, and go back in time to the ancient end. Now two photons > can travel. They go back, and now there are four. This whole buildup > would happen outside of spacetime, hence they would presumably appear > instantly. So if the wormhole started out non-causally connected, as > it approached causal connection single photons could turn into repeated > streams of photons, which would get closer and closer together as causal > connection was approached. An infinite flux would appear just as it > became paradoxical. But isn't there a logical problem here? Aren't you supposing a mechanism that prevents temporal loops that actually relies on temporal loops to work? Elias Israel eisrael@east.sun.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 08:53:41 PDT From: desilets@sj.ate.slb.com (Mark Desilets) Subject: Priorities I, Mark DeSilets wrote: > >IMHO, the answer is easy. Personal Immortality would be the first priority, > >since its attainment would allow more time to focus on the other aspects > >of self transfomation, boundless expansion, space migration, wild partying, > >etc. > > To me, it's like saying that putting on pants for an important meeting > is the main priority because it allows you to focus on the other aspects of > the meeting... Priority, IMO, (in this context) is in something you want > to get, rather than a tool you [might need to] use. > > I'd definitely pick D) - Optimal Self-Transformation as the highest > priority; the Personal Immortality, Maximum Socio-economic Freedom, > Maximum Technological Access, Space Activities, Meetings and Other > are just tools/conditions for transformation; Well, Sasha, I see your point... sort of. I think you misinterpret my comment to mean that I will forego optimal self-transformation (OST) until I have achieved personal immortality (PI). Not so!! However, the gist of the original question was "if you had to pick one of these, which would you pick". I hope you see that given PI, one would have a great deal of time to pursue OST, while if one achieved OST first, one could easily run out of time before achieving PI, thus rendering OST useless. Note that as cryonics is our current best shot at PI, one need not (although one certainly could!) focus on it that sharply. Thus, I spend my current (non-allocated) time working on OST, maximizing SEF, and throwing in a reasonable amount of WP. In the context of the original question, however, my original answer still stands! Live Long and Prosper, Mark ============================================================================== | DoD #1.03144248E28 | Vote Libertarian | Mark DeSilets (408)437-5122 | | Redskins, Orioles | | desilets@sj.ate.slb.com | ============================================================================== | Laete paschimur quos nos doment | ============================================================================== ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 10:46:20 -0500 From: extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Craig Presson) Subject: EXTROPY: Seven more copies spotted In <9304121428.AA03139@churchy.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, Derek Zahn writes: |> |> Well, this weekend I went out to the Borders book store [...]there they |> were -- seven copies of Extropy. [...] |> This time, in a wry twist of fate, it was sandwiched between |> two pagan/witchcraft/mystic magazines. Two data do not a trend make, but that's where they shelve it at Bookstar in Huntsville, AL also -- on the bottom shelf with Magickal Blend and suchlike. Most likely, that's just where all the small-press-run stuff is. ^ / ------/---- extropy@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) / / ** FIDONET DISTRIBUTION FORBIDDEN ** ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 13:25:04 EDT From: eisrael@suneast.East.Sun.COM (Elias Israel - SunSelect Engineering) Subject: FTL: traversable wormholes (was HUMOR: UFO's from future?) Edgar Swank writes: > I seem to recall hearing that, according to relativity(?), FTL travel > is -equivalent- to time travel; if you can do either you can do both. OK, here's my chance to see if I understand the traversable wormhole concept accurately: The traversable wormhole doesn't really allow travel at velocities greater than c, all it really does is allow one (given sufficient technological prowess) to bridge to distant locations so that travel between them requires translation over a (significantly) smaller volume of space. It doesn't seem unusual to me that the distance between two points in space-time might differ depending on how you measured it, if you assume that there needn't be only three space dimensions. Of course, my knowledge of these subjects is limited to what I can glean from Scientific American and other, similar publications; I'm no physicist. Elias Israel eisrael@east.sun.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 12:07:00 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Libertarians accepting govt. $ ? X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Zachary Zaidman says: > > On accepting government $. [...] > I have a personal desire to be morally and logically consistent > whenever possible, but in the case of accepting government money I > am not sure how I feel. I know that if I give it up it will not go > back to those who have _made_ it (and this is only the beginning of > that argument). But I feel uneasy about playing a part in this > system and benefiting from it even though I am often compelled to do > so. I am sure many of you are familiar with this particular dilemma > and may have thought about it more than I have. > > Among other activities, I am working towards a graduate degree for > which I have recently been awarded a big federal fellowship. I am > almost certain that I will accept the award and I think it would be > irrational at this stage not to. However, I do not want to catch > myself making justifications without having careful arguments to > support my actions. I have more than a few reasons to believe that I > am doing the "right thing" but I wonder what experiences others have > had with this kind of thinking. I have an easy answer for you. If you have been taxed by more than the amount of the fellowship, or anticipate being taxed by more than that amount, think of it as partial return of stolen property. Perry ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 93 13:20:57 EDT From: Duncan Frissell <76630.3577@CompuServe.COM> Subject: Organizations (Dave Burns) >>>(Coase asked) if markets are so great why have firms >>>at all? His answer was transactions costs. Alchian and Demsetz said >>>it was the difficulty of measuring marginal products for team >>>production. Others (Hart? Williamson?) want to look at a firm as a >>>nexus of contracts. They would say that Browne's scenario is not >>>really different from what firms all do. Oh boy! My favorite subject. Coase got the Econ Nobel in 1991, didn't he? I always assumed that firms derived a competitive advantage in the past from the transaction costs involved in individuals hiring each other in the spot market and from the returns to scale involved in wholesale purchases of goods and services. Also the returns to scale involved in maintaining a large distribution network in the more primitive markets of the past. (You know -- 20 years ago. ) These days, I can rent a 747 or an order taking 800 number service or a fulfillment company as easy as picking up the phone. Once electronic markets improve it will be even easier. I pay less for the goods I buy than does the bureaucracy of the large firm I contract with. They have to pay more for labor than I would as a small employer. Meanwhile there are negative returns to scale developing. Large firms are more vulnerable to private litigation and public regulation. Small firms or individuals can ignore the regulatory system more easily than large firms because the enforcement costs involved in tracking them are too high. The Economist did an article "The Incredible Shrinking Firm" several years ago on the effect of computers on average firm size which was the opposite of what was predicted when mainframes were invented. Duncan Frissell Here is an excerpt from The Economist: Computers were supposed to centralise decision-making and produce ever, bigger firms. They seem to have done just the opposite Peering into its crystal ball in 1958, the Harvard Business Review said that computers would revolutionise American business. By the end of the 1980s they would ensure that American business would be concentrated as never before. The economy would be dominated by a few giant firms. Within each firm important decisions would be made by a handful of executives with access to the firm's single, big computer. If computers are so good at gathering information from outside the firm, why does not a corresponding improvement in information gathering within the firm make decision making more centralised? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that, loth though they are to admit it, top people's capacity to deal with information is limited. There is no technical reason why a Wall Street investment house should not line the walls of the managing director's office with screens, showing second-by-second price movements for thousands of securities. But there is not much a single person could do with all that information. So the best way to take advantage of increases in the amount of information coming into the firm is to push decision-making down the corporate hierarchy, to where the flow is manageable by a single mind: on Wall Street, a trader. ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 Issue #0189 ****************************************