Liberty

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..

Building a strawman are ye? I'm actually really sympathetic to the argument for gold, and think there's a very high chance that it will "work", probably partly because enough people believe that it will work. It might be a self-fulfilling prophecy because of that critical mass. I'm just not sure if it's the best use of my capital. Now that's going off the deep end. Blind faith in gold is one thing, but the price of gold is entirely set by human actions. The nature of reality and the universe isn't like that. If you have blind faith in something and it works, it doesn't mean that everything you have blind faith in will work too. That's logic 101. Back to the strawman: I dislike how you seem to put words in my mouth and ascribe financial beliefs to me. You have no idea what my opinions are about monetary policy, governments, or whether I can think outside the box of whatever. Speak for yourself, and I'll speak for myself.

Ha! Honestly, I'm really attracted by gold, and even more by silver (which has more industrial uses). But that attraction is partly irrational, as I can't really give myself an argument in favor of buying some that is tight enough to allow me to do it. I really wish I could better value precious metals (though cash cost of production + exploration might be a good start, but what about on the demand side?)... I don't know. I'm still learning about them. Anyway, I still prefer productive businesses :)

As long as you agree that you can't disprove that there's an invisible dragon in my garage, fairies at the bottom of my garden, a magical teapot orbiting saturn, and that Thor actually runs the universe, and that technically you have to be agnostic about all those things because they can't be disproved. Oh, and that you can never ever prove that anything doesn't exist (can't prove a negative), so that assertion has no value and doesn't make a "not disproved" thing more likely to exist. Oh, and lastly, I wouldn't agree that physicists/scientists have done "nothing to dispute that". Many of the arguments used by religious people in the past have changed over time because science has shown that they weren't correct. That's certainly disputing something, and it does show how those who claim to have the truth can actually be pretty flexible in what they use to justify their beliefs. I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate on the link between explaining my reasoning on this topic and naïveté. Thanks.

Well, I definitely need to lighten up and leave this thread and go back to listening to conference calls that's for sure! I'm not even on the West coast so it's quite late here :D Cheers Parsad.

I'm 30. Is this an attempt to pull rank on me or something? An appeal to authority or some other logical fallacy that has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of my reasoning? A way to put me in the "young" bucket so you can more easily dismiss anything I say? Not that it matters; if I happened to be 50, you'd probably find some other way... Next you'll say: "Oh, I was just like you when I was your age, but I grew out of it..." *sigh* Indeed, I did not fully comprehend what you meant in your first paragraph because it wasn't clearly stated. But now with this elaboration which clarifies your meaning, I can say: Not knowing why there is something instead of nothing or how it happened or why (if there's a why - some things just happen without any entity that has a reason for them) just tells you that you don't know. It's not a license to fill that blank with anything pulled out of thin air anymore than not knowing how the sun worked was a license to call it a god. Fact is that all the evidence that we have access to is part of the observable universe, limited by the speed of light, and that anything inside that system probably can't tell you about whatever happened before the big bang. But there doesn't have to be something 'before' the big bang. Our intuitive grasp of time comes from our evolved past. Reality can be a lot more counter-intuitive than that. It is possible that the big bang was the beginning of time, or that it is one of many universes running in cycles, or that there's a meta-verse, or whatever.. Not knowing which of these or other possible hypotheses is the correct one doesn't mean there's a god behind it all, it means that we don't know. When we find evidence for a god, then that'll be something else entirely. It also doesn't mean that there needs to be a reason or a plan behind how things happen. Why is gravity what it is? How about it just is. Questions about the origins of our universe are fascinating. But I don't like when mysteries are used to justify stuff for which there's no evidence (a compounding of mysteries).

Age doesn't change facts, being old or young doesn't have anything to do with it. But being older and having grown up during a time in which it was more common to indoctrinate children before they were old enough to think critically probably has something to do with more older people believing certain things... Go ahead and tell Hawkings and all the other physicists that they don't know what they're doing... Next you can tell Andrew Wiles that his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was flawed :o Our brains haven't evolved to intuitively grasp thinks like quantum mechanics or general relativity, and that's why they seem so weird and nonsensical to us (same reason why we can't think in 7 dimensions or about objects moving at relativistic speeds or whatever). But the math provides predictions that are testable with instruments and experiments, and at very very very very high levels of precision. This isn't just made up sh*t, we know a lot about how the universe works even if it doesn't make sense to you.

I've heard a different saying: The best antidote to christianity is actually reading the bible. ;) Really? Please elaborate on this, because that's an interesting claim about science as much as it is about religion. What do you see there that "almost perfectly parallels the modern scientific view of cosmological and earthly evolution" except in the broadest sense and most ex post facto fitting of the data? Do you see anything that convincingly couldn't have been written by people from that era? If it's such a good parallel, why doesn't evolutionary and cosmological science have roots in biblical texts (I mean, if it's all really "almost perfectly" there, seems like a good starting point to create testable hypotheses, no?) rather than having had to fight off untruths from the bible (heliocentrism, flat earth, young earth, living things being designed as finished entities, humans being separate from the animal kingdom, supernatural forces controlling everyday events, etc), and why have christians of all kinds fought evolution by natural selection so hard for so long (and still do in many cases)? Are you sure you're not just rationalizing and cherry picking to make the data fit your new beliefs rather than looking at the evidence to figure out what it leads to? I think many people don't feel they can fight the mountain of evidence that science provides but they viscerally don't want to stop believing whatever they believe, so they kind of hand-wave it all away by saying "oh well, it all fits with the bible anyway". But saying that doesn't make it so; it's a testable claim, and looking at the bible and comparing it with the science shows it doesn't gel except if you really torture the meaning of things (in the way that reading too much into stuff does; not in the way it would read if someone who actually knew the facts would have transmitted the information). If the bible and the oral tradition of christianity didn't exist, could we just look at the world and figure out 'christian truths' about the origin of the universe and life based on observation? If not, why isn't there evidence of all those things while we're findings lots of evidence for lots of other alternative explanations? If you had read the bible without having learned about modern science, would you have come out thinking things that are compatible with scientific findings? Why try to graft the supernatural onto modern scientific theories (evolution, cosmology) that were devised entirely without finding any evidence of the supernatural, theories that work just fine without postulating these magical occurrences (ie. occam's razor)? Isn't that like saying that computer CPUs also run on a kind of magic that we just can't find evidence for? I mean, how likely is it that a world that is anything like what the bible describes would be so devoid of any evidence for those things that some people are still looking for even the smallest thing to hang onto hundreds of years later, without even speaking of the big things that could be incontrovertible evidence for all to see if they were present? If you don't take the bible literally, how do you decide what should be taken literally, what shouldn't, and how to interpret what shouldn't? And if reality doesn't allow for every person to have their own personal truth, how come most christians seem to be interpreting things differently, and how do you know your interpretation is close to the truth? How do you decide which parts to follow and which parts to drop (all the childish tantrums thrown by god, mostly out of petty jealousy; the genocides, infanticides, and honor rapes of daughters and slavery and such -- I'm assuming you don't base your life on those, but why not?)? Why are those bad parts in there do you think? Doesn't fallibility in some places show that the rest can be false too? How do you know it's right to not believe in most of the gods and religious teachings that people have ever believed in (thor, vishnu, apollo, etc.. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gods ) but that the christian god isn't like that? Why not go all the way and be atheistic about one more :) I'm sorry, but everytime someone says how scientific and coherent with modern theories the bible is, it just raises all those questions to which I never saw good answers...

Very interesting video, thanks for posting. I sure hope that job pays well! :P

I don't think it matters too much in the end, as it's not like religious folks can't be arrogant too. All humans can be, and saying "the sky is blue" with an arrogant tone doesn't make the sky green. What matters in the end is the correctness of the reasoning and the evidence on which it is based, and so far I don't find any religious arguments for the supernatural convincing, whether they are delivered humbly or arrogantly. That's the bottom line for me. But as we're moving away from evolutionary biology and such, I'm losing interest and I feel others probably are too, so I'll try to only post if there's something I feel could interest people more widely.