52 Message 52: From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Wed Aug 4 21:18:12 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA23525; Wed, 4 Aug 93 21:18:11 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA11397; Wed, 4 Aug 93 21:17:57 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by panix.com id AA07077 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Thu, 5 Aug 1993 00:11:21 -0400 Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 00:11:21 -0400 Message-Id: <199308050411.AA07077@panix.com> To: Exi@panix.com From: Exi@panix.com Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: August 5, 373 P.N.O. [04:11:05 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Thu, 5 Aug 93 Volume 93 : Issue 216 Today's Topics: [1 msgs] AI: slaves, selfishness, evo [2 msgs] HUMOR/AI: slaves, selfishness, evo [1 msgs] Harvey Newstrom [1 msgs] How much does Alcor cost? [1 msgs] Important! Alcor does not recommend insurance agents [1 msgs] Insurance: Consumer Reports evaluation [1 msgs] Intelligence == wisdom == enlightenment? [1 msgs] Natural Law and Senator Joseph Biden [1 msgs] Natural law and natural rights [1 msgs] Worry: evolution and violence [1 msgs] investing [3 msgs] investing [3 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 55899 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 10:24:13 PDT From: thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com (Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~) Subject: Intelligence == wisdom == enlightenment? > Someone (sorry, trashed the message, think it was Richard Kennaway) said > something approximately like "I want intelligence, wisdom, and > enlightenment, which to me all mean the same thing." I was somewhat taken > aback like this; I have always made a distinction along the lines of: > > intelligence == raw processing power (cognitive ability) If we take it from a dictionary, intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, or the measure of the ability to think and reason. I think we are missing another term here: KNOWLEDGE. Even today, the masses tend to confuse knowledge with intelligence. As far as I can tell, the two are exclusive, in that you can be an intelligent person who knows nothing (because intelligence seems to represent a potential, not an actual act of some kind). And, of course, you can know much, but be quite an idiot! :-) > > wisdom == understanding of how things work and how they relate > to one another Here you are basically talking about "common sense", which is an acceptable definiton of wisdom. However, your definition for enlightenment generally would also fall under wisdom, that being a sense of the truth, or good judgement. I would disagree with you later statement about needing to exercise intelligence in order to "acquire" wisdom. Let us not confuse wisdom with knowledge either. As people grow old, they become more _knowledgable_, and therefore have more data to work with. That doesn't necessarily make them wiser. I would argue that wisdom is as much a basic characterstic as intelligence, which doesn't require any specific activity to acquire. > > enlightenment == understanding of what's important and what isn't I don't think this term belongs with the others much, in that enlightenment is nothing more than the act of learning something, or perhaps even as much as understanding something. Thus, there are all forms of englightenment, such as spiritual, philosophical, social, and so forth. Because these things are all fairly subjective, it would be a stretch to define this term as you have above, since your definition implies absolutes. Certainly many extropians consider religion to be one of the most unimportant pursuits of all time, yet what of all the "spiritually enlightened" religious types out there? > Am I in the minority in making this distinction? The reason I make it is > that there are procedural dependencies among them: you've got to exercise > your intelligence to acquire wisdom (except for "received wisdom" aka > dogma), and you have to have accumulated a certain amount of wisdom to > become enlightened. Again, as I stated, I don't think one "accumulates" wisdom. Conventionally, the only thing anyone accumulates is knowledge and cell damage. Accumulated knowledge may take the form of experience, or rather may be derived from experience, or it may be _perceived_ as wisdom, but I don't think it is. Of course, extropians may be the first to actually _adjust_ their intelligence and wisdom. In doing so, they will certainly become "enlightened" about a great many things. > I can't tell whether this is going to provoke a flamefest or not. Absolutely not (at least not from me). I think it is an interesting topic which might have numerous perspectives. Tony Hamilton thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com HAM on HEx ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 15:34:11 EDT From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) Subject: AI: slaves, selfishness, evo I didn't mean to go on about this, but... Mike Price sez- > I claim that many > evolutionary goals are unselfish, whereas Fnerd sees them as extensions > of the concept of "self". An example is parentalism. I claim that > parentalism is an unselfish goal, whereas Fnerd says it's selfish > because parents come to view their children as extensions of themselves... Oops. I sometimes assume that everyone who is on extropians thinks of the same books and ideas as basic as I do. In this case, the book is _The Selfish Gene_ by Richard Dawkins, and the idea is called "Sociobiology," although "the selfish gene" is a better name for the idea, too. A parent's *gene's* are selfish. They "want" to be spread. To that end, they program the parent to be unselfish and take care of his/her relatives, kids especially. Likewise, a worker ant, which shares genes with all of the members of its colony, serves its genes' interest by serving the colony. A human parent is a selfish individual, whose individual selfishness is sometimes turned to "unselfishness" by his or her genes. The unselfishness exists inside a larger, selfish system, the evolution of the genes. All of the "unselfishness" we know is part of a selfish, evolved system--or it peters out. This idea of genetic selfishness is so clearly defined that it makes defining individual selfishness seem hard, but here goes: A totally preprogrammed thingy has no selfishness other than the possible selfishness of its program (e.g., its genes). But any individual that has the ability to learn can develop its own goals and become selfish as an individual, separate from the selfishness of its genes. Obviously, genes that give the individual so much free reign that it stops being interested in the things that spread the genes, are losers. The closer you get to human-level intelligence, the more learning is important and the trickier this balancing/controlling act becomes for the genes. Individual learning is like evolution. There's a dynamic set up by the wiring of the brain and the adaptability of the synapses, where changeable patterns in the brain (okay, let's call them memes) effect the activity of the brain, including indirectly through the body and environment and sensors, which effects the changeable patterns again. So some memes can keep themselves recorded strongly while others fail to or get themselves erased. The more general adaptive cross-connectivity you have, the more this becomes an independent world for memes to evolve in. Learning ability is a very powerful process that allows an organism to have abilities that the genes couldn't evolve directly nearly as fast. In this kind of a situation, individual selfishness starts to make sense, and it's something like our ideas of fun and love--activities that stretch abilities just for the sake of stretching abilities, or do maintenance of meme structures, or spread memes between individuals, or are useful for other meme-centered reasons. The memes' selfishness is defined in terms of things that help memes keep themselves prominent in the dynamics of the learning system. Humans have evolved to the point where the genes produce a being with a meme-tank, in which evolves another being, and the genes control only the conditions of the meme-being. The genes have to produce a vehicle that's actually fun for the memes to drive, or else a boring, stupid, uninterested driver develops. The genes spend a lot of tricky effort "trying" to make sure the game is slanted so that the memes, in their evolution, become shaped in certain subtle ways so that in their later fun, they do things that spread the genes. So our evolution is more like co-evolution or negotiation between these two evolving systems. (Not counting social evolution here, just the coevolution between the genes and the memes that evolve in individuals.) So my reasons for scepticism about robot slavery as a bridge over the short-term problems of the advent of AI are: Building a learning system is the only reasonably easy way to get intelligence, because individual learning works so fast once it gets going, compared to programming from outside. The more intelligence you want, the more you have to rely on learning. Our genes have spent a lot of time taming memes. Our genes did it by co-evolving the learning system with the rest of the system. I.e., evolution is free to modify both. In designing a robot slave, you're given a master who has little interest in, or ability to, or time to, adapt to the slave. I.e., you're not free to modify one important part. The more learning ability or intelligence you have, the harder it is for the genes to tame the memes. There's only a short time to program slaves: between when AI happens and when either uploading happens--or it's too late. > What's selfish and what isn't is > important here because Fnerd expects only selfish goals to be > evolutionary stable, or to be most compatible with learning over the > lifetime of the slave / neural network or whatever, Above I define both kinds of selfishness in terms of evolutionary stability. Genetic evolution over geologic time and memic evolution over the life of an individual. AI makes possible the copying and culling of individual minds. This could be a more powerful technique than genetic evolution or hand programming, but I suspect it's in the same ballpark. > whereas I don't see > anything special about selfish or pseudo-selfish goals (eg self- > preservations or parentalism) as opposed to non-selfish goals (climbing > Mount Everest, travelling to Andromeda, reading the novels of Ayn Rand > or obeying the orders of your Master to death). Most of these "non-selfish" goals look like perfect examples of memic selfishness the way I'm looking at it...or they might not be. The difference to me is in whether they serve to reinforce themselves as goals, either in an individual or through spread genes or memes. > To my mind any set of > goals is equally impressionable on a blank neural net, irrespective of > their selfishness. Here's a way to think about it: goal structures are organisms in meme space. No arbitrary set of goals is guaranteed to be a viable or prosperous meme-organism. We are used to thinking of goals as "ends" but they all come from somewhere. The lasting ones are parts of memic life cycles and ecologies that sustain and maintain and update them. > The interesting question is, why are so many of our non-selfish goals > interpretable as "selfish"? I think the reason for this is because we > have a number of distinct primary goals creating tensions or cognitive > dissonance.... Conflict between subgoals happens as soon as you start to work on any goal. For instance, to singlemindedly serve a master who's of two minds, would make you of two minds! I don't think any interesting intelligence can be free of conflict--aparent unity of goals comes from coalitions. > I maintain that a slave with a single goal (it doesn't matter what) will > be free of such cognitive dissonance. A slave can be happily imprinted > with a specific master to love, cherish and obey. Just make sure you > don't issue contradictory orders! I think an imposed goal structure, unless it is very carefully balanced, will lead a learning system straight off the edge of the table. Brain death is the simplest solution. Life, on the other hand, exists on the edge of chaos (as they say). -fnerd quote me ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 11:44:45 PDT From: lovejoy@alc.com Subject: Important! Alcor does not recommend insurance agents > My own life-insurance policy ($50K, for neurosuspension) is through New > York Life, and my premiums are $42 per month ($504/year). I'm 28, > non-smoker, carnivore. Do you have a family history of some particular > disease perhaps? Are you a professional skydiver? (On my first attempt to > type that word, I wrote "skydier"... Freudian slip?) > dV/dt > For another data point, here are my stats: In 1989 (age 33), I purchased a $90,000 universal life policy from The Travelers for an annual premium of $664.43. This policy has a disability-waiver-of-premium rider and a COLA rider (every year or three I am offerred an increase in the death benefit equal to accumulated inflation without having to requalify for insurance; if I accept the increase, my premium rises proportionately). In 1990 (age 34), I purchased another $90,000 universal life policy from Time Insurance for an annual premium of $585.92. This policy also has a disability-waiver-of-premium rider and a COLA rider. Both policies have had face-value increases (and hence premium increases) due to exercise of the COLA options, up to about $100,000 in face value. I am a non-smoker with no significant health problems. The policies were issued at the standard rates. They're both paying over 7% on the cash value (which accumulates tax free, of course). What I would recommend today would be either to purchase a policy directly from Ameritas Life (no sales commission), or else to purchase a Universal Life policy that uses a Variable Annuity (which lets you invest in your choice of a selection of stock mutual funds, bond mutual funds and a money market account) instead of the single choice of a bond-fund-like "savings account". --alan (lovejoy@alc.com) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 16:52:56 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: investing "" says: > On Mon, 2 Aug 93 9:56:39 PDT, Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~ wrote: > > >> Are there statistics about long-term investment histories (trusts, > >> for example) and their growth vs. crash-proofness? In the shorter > >> term, do actual smart investors do better than mutual funds? Do > >> mutual funds do better than dartboards? > > > >Well, most books I've read on the topic of _stockbrokers_ show that > >they are no better than dartboards. > > Most of what I've read says that stockbrokers usually do _worse_ than > dartboards. The Wall Street Journal does a dartboard portfolio versus managed portfolios periodically. Although some managers are consistantly worse than the dartboard, others are consistantly better. Boys like Peter Lynch or Paul Tudor Jones aren't statistical flukes. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 14:06:26 PDT From: thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com (Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~) Subject: AI: slaves, selfishness, evo > A human parent is a selfish individual, whose individual selfishness is > sometimes turned to "unselfishness" by his or her genes. The > unselfishness exists inside a larger, selfish system, the evolution of > the genes. All of the "unselfishness" we know is part of a selfish, > evolved system--or it peters out. Just wanted to say that I don't know that we need to explain things this way. I don't see selfishness "turned to unselfishness". There simply _is_ no unselfishness, on an individual level. I'd rather say that all actions are selfish _because_ blah blah blah. The way I see it, there is no such thing as an unselfish act. If you look even at any deliberate act which the actor considers to be unselfish, they had some pyschological need to commit that act. It may have been genetic, or memetic, but the selfish need to do it was still there. I'm a husband and father of two. Why do I take care of my kids? Well, as Fnerd states, it may be some genetic procreation thing. The very presence of my children might be desired on a psychological level for reasons of happiness, even entertainment if you will. Intellectually, having kids might be some kind of exciting "experiment" in child development, and it may also be a direct investment, in that my kids may some day work for me, or do other things beneficial to me. ANd, of course, I may take care of them because if I don't, I go to jail. I'm sure its a combination of all those things, but it doesn't matter, because the point is that all those reasons are selfish. The _value_ of actions, on the other hand, is a totally different matter. If some of the things we do seem to have relatively negative value, then its time to do some genetic or memetic alteration and engineering. I guess after saying all that, it would only be fair to say something else on the subject, which is what I feel this means with regards to slaves, of any sort. I think its just a matter of genetic and memetic manipulation. You can make it so that almost any type of action becomes selfish, or desired. So, if someone is memetically inclined to be a slave (this someone being an animal, person, robot, agent, whatever), then so be it. Do we have some sort of obligation to make everyone/thing think the way we (extropians) do, so they have the same selfish desires we do? I don't think so. But I do think that genetic and memetic _tendencies_ in nature which keep extropian-like ideas (memes) from popping (anti-extropian memes?) up are somewhat doomed. By that I infer that slaves of any kind would have to be engineered as slaves. Tony Hamilton thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com HAM on HEx ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 14:10:17 PDT From: thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com (Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~) Subject: investing > Boys like Peter Lynch or Paul Tudor Jones aren't statistical flukes. No, but they are outliers, Perry. No such thing as a "fluke" in statistics, just outliers, which are what they are for _whatever_ reason. When looking at the statistics, one generally dismisses those outliers as either being invalid, or insignificant. There is a difference. (I'm not lecturing, just clarifying.) Tony Hamilton thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com HAM on HEx ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 14:25:15 PDT From: Robin Hanson Subject: Worry: evolution and violence D. Anton Sherwood writes: >I want to improve my durability, agility, senses and speed, in roughly >that order. ... Assuming that humanity however transformed will not >soon be entirely free of those who would coerce, I see "arms races". >Can a choice of technology paths nudge the arms races in such a way as >to make violence less likely rather than more likely? >If we armor ourselves, the offense concentrates on firepower, with much >collateral damage likely. If instead we seek longevity by redundancy >(backups), the effectiveness of lethal force is limited, and so the >offensive side of the arms race goes into crypto-cracking and the like We should deal with one on one violence mainly through law enforcement, not by personal arms races. That is, we deterring violence by cooperating to threaten punishment after any violence. If personal arms races dominated now, we would all carry Uzis or even drive tanks, but this sort of behavior now happens only where law enforcment has broken down. Beyond some basic social order, the feasibility and cost of law enforcement depends mainly on the costs require to capture a given fraction of criminals, and on the punishment we can inflict on them when caught and convicted. Since pervasive monitoring through TV cameras and the like should be much cheaper, costs to catch and convict should fall. However, there might be problems with the amount of feasible punishment, if an upload could spin off a copy to do some deed, not mind if that copy gets erased or tortured, and could escape any responsibility for the actions of other copies. The only robust solution to this I can see is to generally hold recently split copies responsible for the actions of their mental siblings. If you want to spin a copy but not be held responsible, you should endow that copy with sufficient crime insurance. The insurance, and not you, would then pay should your copy commit a crime. Robin Hanson ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 17:24:30 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: investing Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~ says: > It's not just stockbrokers, though. Whether you're a strict chartist, > fundamentalist, contrarian, or whatever, you're still apt to be no > better than the good old dartboard. THese "systems", by themselves, > are no good. Folks like Peter Lynch make money year in and year out. Personally, from what I can tell it isn't even hard to make money in the markets -- it just requires capital and intelligence. Here is a pretty good strategy: Find well run companies with good products and underpriced stock. Buy them. Might sound idiotically simple, but it seems to work. Thats basically what Peter Lynch did. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 16:30:09 -0500 From: extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) Subject: HUMOR/AI: slaves, selfishness, evo In <9308042106.AA45242@frc060>, Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~ writes: [...] |> I'm a husband and father of two. Why do I take care of my kids? Well, as |> Fnerd states, it may be some genetic procreation thing. [...] "Why are babies cute? So we won't kill 'em!" -- Gallagher My daughter told me that one. -- cP ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 14:54:41 PDT From: thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com (Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~) Subject: investing > > It's not just stockbrokers, though. Whether you're a strict chartist, > > fundamentalist, contrarian, or whatever, you're still apt to be no > > better than the good old dartboard. THese "systems", by themselves, > > are no good. > > Folks like Peter Lynch make money year in and year out. I know. > Personally, from what I can tell it isn't even hard to make money in > the markets -- it just requires capital and intelligence. Intelligence is surprisingly a rare commodity when it comes to investors... > Here is a pretty good strategy: > > Find well run companies with good products and underpriced stock. Buy > them. Ah, but how do you qualify a company as being well-run and underpriced? For the most part, this is all stockbrokers (or their firms' research departments) do also. That and sell their "products" that is. The point is, the concept is simple, as you state in the excerpt below, but the resources needed to put it to work are incredible. This is _not_ armchair investing we're talking about. > Might sound idiotically simple, but it seems to work. Thats basically > what Peter Lynch did. > > Perry What often gives the big winners a great advantage is sheer volume. First of all, if you are important enough to actually have a seat on the exchange (and I admit, I only know that certain brokerages do - do people? ANd I don't know, but I thought basically only brokerages did on AMEX as well), you don't pay commissions. You pay for that seat, but it may be peanuts if the volumes are high. Also, even if you do pay commissions, which even most of the wealthiest of investors have to, they are virtually nothing for large volumes (either in shares or dollars). For instance, the "average" investor is probably paying 5% coming and going. Well, anyone with any sense can surely get 3% last I checked. The difference is that as you go higher in volume and money, the commissions can easily get down to nearly nothing (talking like .05% - maybe lower?). Anyway, when you're in that position, and you can make money off of _any_ margins, it's a lot easier to pull off. There are exceptions, but from what I know of the successful investors, they are by and large people who had money to invest in the first place. I think if you want any kind of flexibility, $10-$30K is a bare minimum. You can surely play with less, but the commissions are higher, the opportunities fewer, and the payoff smaller. This tends to slow down progress by an order of magnitude. Of course, no matter how much you have, you still have to know what you're doing. I still haven't had that $10-$30K I want to play with. Done well with smaller amounts, but like I said, the returns were equally smaller. Tony Hamilton thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com HAM on HEx ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 18:18:30 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Natural Law and Senator Joseph Biden starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu says: > So, Biden doesn't need to be beaten over the head with natural law, he > needs to learn that property rights are part of it. What does it matter what one does and does not consider to be part of a fiction? How can one learn what is and is not part of something that exists only in one's mind? In any case, Joe Biden is the same guy who had to plagarise Neil Kinnock's speeches because his folks were such losers that stealing from a socialist was the best they could do. He also sponsored the "sense of congress" on the government right to tap telephones. He's not a friend. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 93 18:19:47 EDT From: sullivan@blaze.cs.jhu.edu Subject: Insurance: Consumer Reports evaluation Consumer Reports magazine is currently running a three part evaluation of Life Insurance in the July, August and September 1993 issues. I do not always agree with the magazines recommendations on products but I believe they provide a useful starting point. In the article the deceptive practices of some insurance agents and companies are discussed. Many policies are difficult to evaluate because they combine insurance with a investment/savings/retirement plan. The magazine claims term insurance is "the cheapest and most efficient solution to most peoples insurance needs". I do not have the expertise to critically evaluate the two parts I have seen so far but I am certain it will irritate many in the life insurance industry. gfs ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 15:39:31 -0700 From: jamie@netcom.com (Jamie Dinkelacker) Subject: investing It's is possible to start making regular money with a small amount of capital to begin with as a "little guy" without being trampled by the pension funds. Here are a few helpful items. Use a discount broker, buy into industries you understand, have economic reasons for expecting performance from the shares you buy/sell (e.g., undervalued firm, great product that needs a companion technology just coming on line, market size/penetration estimates, point of product lifecycle, high value patents, feasibility of lock-in upgrade path for x years, industry maturity, labor problems, expiration of patents,...), look for good management, be skeptical (not cynical) regarding new products/services, be proactive regarding regular business cycles/seasonality in the industry, and the market. Follow and pay attention to financial news. Look for small niches. Get in and be ready to get out. Call and get annual reports: ask the main switchboard for "investor relations." Read them carefully and look past their author's rose colored glasses. Public libraries have books on how to read an annual report: pay careful attention to such red flags as "ongoing business concern," short term debt, overall debt service and the nature of pending litigation. The more general stuff (e.g., earnings, liabilities) will be evident. Follow the trade press in your target industries. Clip articles; use online news services (e.g, Reuters, DJ). Keep on top of it. Remember, technology does not equal a product! Technology costs cash; products (and licenses) generate cash. Pay attention to marketing/PR efforts of firms and what they do to generate sales. Be mindful of their competitors' actions (unless you buy into all of them as a block). Keep in mind that manufacturing without marketing equals scrap. Watch for patterns of "insider trading" like those listed regularly in the San Jose Mercury News (which executives are buying/selling and make an educated guess why...for cash? for position? for protection?). Don't fall in love with a stock; always be ready to sell and have expected price points of when to unload (either up or down). When these points occur, act immediately. Be cautious from whom you accept advice about investing. Most who have money, use it. Look at the car they drive, their "toys," their home, lifestyle, social activities. Are they in the first cabin or cargo hold? Guard your cash. Roll over your earnings as reinvestment and diversify. Act quickly to cut your losses. If you like excitement, precious metals are a good place to store earnings when metals are dropping (e.g., watch the gold fix in Tokyo and London and be ready in the AM in the American market). Take profits from securities and move it to metals. Unless you're an expert, other commodities can be suicide or at least lead to ulcers. It's also very, very valuable to form a small "investment club" with friends to garner their insights, benefit from their learning and networks, and have others to sound out decisions. It can be fun, and can generate a regular income stream. ............................... Jamie Dinkelacker, Palo Alto CA Jamie@netcom.com | 415.941.4782 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 18:50:57 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Natural law and natural rights Bob Kuhfahl says: > extropy@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) writes: > > > Natural law is dead, James. Customary and common > > law are under attack (see e.g., _The Death of Contract_). NL is like > > the occult -- it can't work if people don't believe in it. Today, > > lawyers, judges, and Congresscritters do not believe in NL. > > > I hope that is not true. I've only been exposed to this topic for a few > weeks now - I just got an internet account a few months ago and my eyes > are being opened to many things I did not get in college. The concept of > NL seems very "natural" to me, pardon the pun, maybe fundamental would be > a better term. So, where is the natural law located? Can someone show me the equations that define it? I am a libertarian -- further, I'm an anarchocapitalist. I believe that the non-coercion principle is a good thing. However, the universe doesn't give a rats ass if we live or die. The mere fact that were the whole of the human race to follow the NCP my goals would be advanced does not mean that my goals, or those of anyone else, or the notion of the NCP itself, are in any way "natural". All I can say is that certain rules operating in society have certain effects in general -- not that any of them are somehow mandated. Stalinism, genocide of all people who wear glasses, or the income tax, are not inherently bad -- we just are folks who dislike them because they interfere with what we want. Most people tend to want what we want because of evolution -- we expect that species tend to be survival oriented or we wouldn't see them around, as they wouldn't survive. However, this doesn't make survival or rules that make survival possible "good". It just makes them our choice. I will defend my choice to the death -- but the notion that its The day you get me a scientific demonstration of "natural law" is the day I believe in it. Such a demonstration would have to be real scientific proof that the universe cares about how I behave one way or another. From what I can tell, natural law is just a religion. It may be a religion who's adherents happen to believe things that I like -- but that doesn't make it less of a religion. You can believe that F=ma (one of the laws of Newtonian physics) because you've seen it in a laboratory and tested it and have confidence that it holds. You can also believe it because your minister told you so. Either way its still right -- but one way reflects an understanding that will help you out in understanding why Newtonian mechanics only work at speeds much less than that of light, and the other way just makes you a religous person who happens to know the right answer by coincidence. Libertarian Adherents of "natural law" strike me as being people who know what the right answer a lot of the time but have no idea why its right. They take their arguments from faith and authority, and claim to be scientific about it the same way that Marxists used to believe that their ideas were "scientific" and had been "proven right". I possess certain goals for arational reasons (largely because evolution has burned them into my hardware, but never mind that). I have seen what I think of as good scientific evidence, in the form of experiment and studies of the real world, that certain legal systems will promote my arationally chosen goals. But I don't claim that my goals are somehow primal, that I can somehow discern "the good" beyond the "what is good for Perry Metzger", or that what I think is good for Perry Metzger is "Natural Law". "Metzger Law" perhaps, but not "Natural Law". > My comp sci courses reiterated "keep it simple" and I have > learned to abide by that wisdom in very many of the things I do. I have a > utopian hope that man-kind could have a simple set of rules to live by. There might be a simple set of rules that satisfy the goals of most of the human race -- I tend to think so -- but is it proper to refer to these as "natural law"? I tend not to think so think so. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 18:56:02 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Harvey Newstrom Harvey Newstrom says: > About coenzyme Q-10, here is an excerpt from my _Nutrients Catalog_: Is this going to be available in machine readable format? Might make searching a lot easier... Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 19:01:10 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: How much does Alcor cost? Harvey Newstrom says: > > ...in our experience, a healthy person aged > > around thiry may obtain a $50,000 whole-life policy for under > > $500 per year. > > Is this a reasonable price? The insurance agents that *Alcor* recommended to > me is charging me $1500 a year. I am 30, non-smoker, vegetarian, etc. I don't know whats reasonable in terms of cost, but I have some life insurance advice to give out. I don't recommend getting whole life if you are only 30. The returns on your money are abysmal, and you have no inflation protection in most instances. (Indexing on most policies maxes out around 10% inflation a year -- which is nothing in a hyperinflation situation.) The right thing to do, if you have the discipline, is to get term insurance and religiously invest the rest of the money yourself. If you just do o.k. you will likely beat the insurance company's returns by a wide margin. If you are smart, as most extropians are, and careful, which is something extropians sometimes are, you can do far better for yourself. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 19:14:04 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: investing Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~ says: > > Boys like Peter Lynch or Paul Tudor Jones aren't statistical flukes. > > No, but they are outliers, Perry. No such thing as a "fluke" in statistics, > just outliers, which are what they are for _whatever_ reason. When looking > at the statistics, one generally dismisses those outliers as either being > invalid, or insignificant. There is a difference. (I'm not lecturing, just > clarifying.) They aren't insignificant. The method of analysis you are advocating is fine if you are studying a collection of random events -- but its lousy for studying why humans succeed or fail to succeed at a particular enterprise. In particular, Paul Jones has never made less than 40% a year on his clients money and in some years has made several hundred percent. He's done it long enough that were he just a random event he'd have to be spectacularly improbable. He isn't the only one. There are dozens of such fund managers. They all tend to be extremely knowledgeable, extremely smart, and pretty good. There are loads of folks out there who lose money, but I've noticed an interesting phenomenon -- a disproportionate number of the ones who do badly don't understand what they are buying and selling and have low intelligence, and a disproportionate number of the guys who make money seem to be smart guys who understand what it is they are buying and why. This leads me to believe that its brains and experience, not luck, that dictates if you make money in the markets. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Aug 1993 19:34:24 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: investing Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~ says: > > Here is a pretty good strategy: > > > > Find well run companies with good products and underpriced stock. Buy > > them. > > Ah, but how do you qualify a company as being well-run and > underpriced? Well, when I've done it, its generally been easy. Find a company you really like and who's products you use -- say, Cabletron a couple of years ago. Then, examine the PE ratio of the stock, read the annual report, and do some more miscelaneous research. If you have a friend there, ask them how they like the place and the like. If the company looks well run, you like their products, and the stock looks like the ratio of price to future earnings is probably low, then buy. Its not hard. > For the most part, this is all stockbrokers (or their firms' research > departments) do also. Yeah, but they are idiots for the most part. Think the analyst who covers Qualcomm for your local brokerage knows spread spectrum from mayonaise? Not usually. > That and sell their "products" that is. The point is, > the concept is simple, as you state in the excerpt below, but the resources > needed to put it to work are incredible. This is _not_ armchair investing > we're talking about. Its easy. Call up the company you are interested in. Get copies of their 10Ks and 10Qs for a few years, and their annuals. They will send them for free. Look at their product catalogs and the like. Do a little simple research into the company at the library. Stick to things you know -- if you understand the product because you work in the field or with the equipment, you have hundreds or thousands of hours of legwork that the analysts will never do already behind you. Its really not that hard. Of course, most of my investment life has been during a bull market, but still, its never been that difficult. > What often gives the big winners a great advantage is sheer volume. First > of all, if you are important enough to actually have a seat on the exchange > (and I admit, I only know that certain brokerages do - do people? ANd I don't > know, but I thought basically only brokerages did on AMEX as well), you > don't pay commissions. You pay for that seat, but it may be peanuts > if the volumes are high. Peter Lynch didn't make his money off of avoiding commissions -- he made it because he picked good stocks. If you want to pay low commissions, you can. Go to a discount broker like Schwab or Fidelity. (Schwab even has programs for your PC that enter trades for you by modem -- they give you discounts for using them!) If you get experienced, you can go to a deep discount broker and save even more. Some of the deep discounters will sell to you for only $.02 or $.03 a share commission, which is very close to what institutions pay, and not so far from the lowest even people with seats on the exchange manage in practice. `taint hard, me boy. > Also, even if you do pay commissions, which even most of the > wealthiest of investors have to, they are virtually nothing for > large volumes (either in shares or dollars). For instance, the > "average" investor is probably paying 5% coming and going. Only fools pay that much. (Fools or people who work for one of the houses -- I'm required to trade through Lehman. The commissions are sky high. It blows -- believe me.) > There are exceptions, but from what I know of the successful investors, > they are by and large people who had money to invest in the first place. > I think if you want any kind of flexibility, $10-$30K is a bare minimum. > You can surely play with less, Mutual funds will take investments of far far less. Perry ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #216 ********************************* &