That voters are ignorant comes as no surprise to anyone who isn't themselves ignorant.
Hypothesis: most discourse is broken, not just layhuman discourse. I expect any working discourses to work by accident, not by design.
Test: let's have a discussion about utopianism and revolution. My general impression is that anti-utopianism is opposition to legitimately broken political philosophy by way of strawmen. It supposes that utopian philosophers suggest a flawless, suffering-less society is possible, and in the process tend to be not anti-Progressive, but anti-progress. (Agree that proggies are probably utopian...we'll see, as below.)
Can I get a summary of how I might recognize a utopian system, and why I can be sure that these features predict that the political philosophy is self-defeating?
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
Juxtaposition VI: How Broken is the Public Discourse?
Health insurance is not insurance. Most of the stuff you can buy is like food insurance.
What are the odds that someone could convince voters to stop calling it insurance? That, unless you choose a policy according to a plan of never making a claim against it, you only manage to pay extra for routine stuff?
On the other side of the fence,
If it were a random pattern of insight and foolishness, I wouldn't worry about it. I suspect even the insight is dominated by foolishness. Would that third quoted guy actually pick up a weapon without social pressure? Or: why isn't there already racial civil war in South Africa? Does #2 think voting will fix things, and can anything convince them otherwise?
What are the odds that someone could convince voters to stop calling it insurance? That, unless you choose a policy according to a plan of never making a claim against it, you only manage to pay extra for routine stuff?
On the other side of the fence,
"Interesting that yet again, the wise [via] of the world are foolish, while this guy, surely representing the dregs of humanity, sees through the charade."Dailymail should probably have never allowed comments.
"I know I shouldn't laugh........so I HOWLED instead.......poor police, imagine calling that in on the radio ( assuming it still worked) "unable to pursue suspect......all cars crushed" ....a bit like their pride I should imagine :-)" (Rated +710, Via.)
"You see this more and more. This is what progressive government will bring in America. You can't take away people's life long liberties one at a time, and tax them more and more, and expect that they are going to tolerate it. America needs to turn away from this path or it will be a civil war again." (+210.)
If it were a random pattern of insight and foolishness, I wouldn't worry about it. I suspect even the insight is dominated by foolishness. Would that third quoted guy actually pick up a weapon without social pressure? Or: why isn't there already racial civil war in South Africa? Does #2 think voting will fix things, and can anything convince them otherwise?
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Juxtaposition V: Reality vs. Presentation.
One hundred tons. (Via.)
Fifteen hundred tons.
Winner: one hundred tons.
To me, the distinction between reality and presentation is unmistakable. The presentation edits out more information than they leave in. The main character is the narrator. The second character is the Navy, the third, Communism. Indeed it seems like the physical events they're supposedly describing are only included grudgingly, as an excuse, because they're not allowed to go full-blown narcissist.
Net result: presentations are boring, as they're all almost identical. Aside from the comparison, there's no need to watch that second video, a couple sentences of description covers everything that isn't copypasta. (See also: nearly everything on the BBC. They even have one decrying the style while still using following it exactly.)
The narrator spends a lot of time telling you how you should feel about the events. I mean, you do have your own opinion, right? Your reaction to the first movie is not, "Okay, but what does this mean?" is it?
Yet, the market consistently rewards presentation over reality. I wouldn't begrudge them that if they didn't begrudge me my reality. Are layhumans really that fascinated by stories they already know? To the point where networks deliberately edit out anything unfamiliar?
In the direct representation of reality, three quarters of the video is dedicated solely to the event. It is allowed to be itself. At least, it is allowed to speak whatever it wants to the available measurement instruments.
For me, this is well symbolized by the movie-ricochet noises. Whenever I see a detail like that, I begin to think it might not have been massaged to within an inch of its life. Which detail, amusingly, I've never heard in a movie after an explosion. Real things don't conform to the rules of drama, do not support clean political narratives, and have unexpected details. Every real event is a little surprising, every new object just a little different. It asymptotes toward zero with familiarity, but even my cream cartons are never exactly as I expect them to be.
In retrospect, I never believe in movie explosions. Before now I didn't have enough reference material to notice that's what I was feeling, but now I recognize the pattern. Movie; "There was an explosion!" Me: "No there wasn't, you're lying." Why? Because they're exactly what I'm expecting.
I wonder if 'inhuman' would be a good summary.
All real events - even real artifacts and e.g. bureaucracies - are a little alien. A little unintuitive perhaps? They don't neatly slot into instinctive concepts or causal relations. Perhaps best illustrated by the exceptions, things like one-on-one sociology. The instinctive categories work perfectly for figuring out how another human will categorize, and therefore understand, an event. Similarly, the explosion is exactly what I was expecting, which means it is exactly how I would portray an explosion - if I weren't aware of this alienness principle.
Another exception: rocks, trees, and water. (I find this especially disappointing because they could be interesting, but almost never are.) Or perhaps not; when mining or growing trees, you'll find them doing many unexpected things.
I think the key thing is the category thing. New events never fit neatly into old categories, even in combination. Real events are mind-expanding. Events I have no built familiarity with should not seem familiar. I don't usually encounter explosions, that goes double for military instead of controlled, and therefore I shouldn't find depictions of them familiar.
This is one of the reasons I think I have a solid grasp of logic. It is, by now, rare that I see an argument that doesn't fit neatly into my existing experience.
Fifteen hundred tons.
Winner: one hundred tons.
To me, the distinction between reality and presentation is unmistakable. The presentation edits out more information than they leave in. The main character is the narrator. The second character is the Navy, the third, Communism. Indeed it seems like the physical events they're supposedly describing are only included grudgingly, as an excuse, because they're not allowed to go full-blown narcissist.
Net result: presentations are boring, as they're all almost identical. Aside from the comparison, there's no need to watch that second video, a couple sentences of description covers everything that isn't copypasta. (See also: nearly everything on the BBC. They even have one decrying the style while still using following it exactly.)
The narrator spends a lot of time telling you how you should feel about the events. I mean, you do have your own opinion, right? Your reaction to the first movie is not, "Okay, but what does this mean?" is it?
Yet, the market consistently rewards presentation over reality. I wouldn't begrudge them that if they didn't begrudge me my reality. Are layhumans really that fascinated by stories they already know? To the point where networks deliberately edit out anything unfamiliar?
In the direct representation of reality, three quarters of the video is dedicated solely to the event. It is allowed to be itself. At least, it is allowed to speak whatever it wants to the available measurement instruments.
For me, this is well symbolized by the movie-ricochet noises. Whenever I see a detail like that, I begin to think it might not have been massaged to within an inch of its life. Which detail, amusingly, I've never heard in a movie after an explosion. Real things don't conform to the rules of drama, do not support clean political narratives, and have unexpected details. Every real event is a little surprising, every new object just a little different. It asymptotes toward zero with familiarity, but even my cream cartons are never exactly as I expect them to be.
In retrospect, I never believe in movie explosions. Before now I didn't have enough reference material to notice that's what I was feeling, but now I recognize the pattern. Movie; "There was an explosion!" Me: "No there wasn't, you're lying." Why? Because they're exactly what I'm expecting.
I wonder if 'inhuman' would be a good summary.
All real events - even real artifacts and e.g. bureaucracies - are a little alien. A little unintuitive perhaps? They don't neatly slot into instinctive concepts or causal relations. Perhaps best illustrated by the exceptions, things like one-on-one sociology. The instinctive categories work perfectly for figuring out how another human will categorize, and therefore understand, an event. Similarly, the explosion is exactly what I was expecting, which means it is exactly how I would portray an explosion - if I weren't aware of this alienness principle.
Another exception: rocks, trees, and water. (I find this especially disappointing because they could be interesting, but almost never are.) Or perhaps not; when mining or growing trees, you'll find them doing many unexpected things.
I think the key thing is the category thing. New events never fit neatly into old categories, even in combination. Real events are mind-expanding. Events I have no built familiarity with should not seem familiar. I don't usually encounter explosions, that goes double for military instead of controlled, and therefore I shouldn't find depictions of them familiar.
This is one of the reasons I think I have a solid grasp of logic. It is, by now, rare that I see an argument that doesn't fit neatly into my existing experience.
Monday, July 30, 2012
The Kitchen Test of Science
My default reaction to scientific papers is, "Sure, pull the other one." It's because things like this keep happening. (Via.)
Just spent a day and a bit learning NetLogo. Before I started, I thought it would be longer. Now I've spent several hours asking questions of a simple evolutionary model, and haven't yet run into anything I wanted to tell it to do but didn't know how to do. (Syntax not included, as it takes seconds to look up.) My opinion of the effort required has gone down monotonically.
Two possibilities. One, their study is just broken. Two, it doesn't apply to me. Perhaps I'm not a consumer. I can at least be sure that the opposite of their conclusions are true in my kitchen.
Their epistemology is broken. Since they use the same epistemology to measure the effect of e.g. salt, I can be sure they're fooling themselves there, too. Maybe salt is bad for the general populace. Or not. I can't re-run the experiment in general, only on myself, so I can't check how good are studies in general. But their study is simply not evidence one way or the other about whether it's bad for me.
I like them as sources of things to check. How much does the average study cost in grants and wages? Does anyone know? In any case, it is an impressively inefficient hypothesis-generation engine.
As for anyone who doesn't have the necessary time or discipline to check? Worthless at best.
"[The authors] find that consumers are overconfident in their ability to learn to use skill-based products before trying them out. As soon as they gain experience with the product, however, they flip to the opposite extreme and become under-confident in their ability to use the new product with the consequence that they often quit using it."For me? The opposite.
Just spent a day and a bit learning NetLogo. Before I started, I thought it would be longer. Now I've spent several hours asking questions of a simple evolutionary model, and haven't yet run into anything I wanted to tell it to do but didn't know how to do. (Syntax not included, as it takes seconds to look up.) My opinion of the effort required has gone down monotonically.
Two possibilities. One, their study is just broken. Two, it doesn't apply to me. Perhaps I'm not a consumer. I can at least be sure that the opposite of their conclusions are true in my kitchen.
Their epistemology is broken. Since they use the same epistemology to measure the effect of e.g. salt, I can be sure they're fooling themselves there, too. Maybe salt is bad for the general populace. Or not. I can't re-run the experiment in general, only on myself, so I can't check how good are studies in general. But their study is simply not evidence one way or the other about whether it's bad for me.
I like them as sources of things to check. How much does the average study cost in grants and wages? Does anyone know? In any case, it is an impressively inefficient hypothesis-generation engine.
As for anyone who doesn't have the necessary time or discipline to check? Worthless at best.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Immigration Data Audit
I thought more about immigrants and I worked out that the studies showing immigrants make the country richer cannot possibly be correct.
Tribal affiliation warning: I still maintain immigration is none of your business until an immigrant imposes externalities on your property, and then you should have the right to sue. It is the immigrant's sponsor's responsibility to make sure they impose no externalities, or to pay in advance for indulgences.
This is instead a screed against the economist and academic tribes, because their tribal norms enrich them at everyone else's expense. In this case, some random asshole from the internet notices a hole larger than any factor the supposed experts actually accounted for.
In an efficient market immigrants would be good, because labour isn't like other goods. Each immigrant would work hard enough to make their own stuff and then some - society would gain from the excess. However, we know that most immigrants are not high-value workers; they have a small surplus at the best of times.
The government taxes. The government provides benefits. Is there any chance that the government doesn't cost society more per immigrant than the immigrant provides in surplus?
Of course, each immigrant provides votes, and even illegals provide sales tax. In other words, the government - those who by definition have the power to determine immigration - gains money and power cost-free for every immigrant.
Don't forget that sovereign accounting is weird. They essentially don't have to pay for benefits, because it is funded by inflation. However, more taxes means that the individuals involved in government have more to influence and more to skim from.
To check my conclusion, the first search hit seemed sufficient.
So, the government taxes or inflates, then provides services with these dollars. Taxes have deadweight costs, and public provision costs 10-100 times as much as a comparable private provision, especially accounted in terms of stuff.
Then, it turns around and taxes immigrants. With more deadweight costs. On the margin, it uses these taxes to hinder pre-existing wealth-creation activities.
These effects are not accounted for in the official studies.
But, I'll in turn check my reading...
Haha, oops. They found the conclusion they wanted, then stopped. If they hadn't found it, they would have kept looking, or, Robert Putnam style, not published.
In turn, if there's anything I've missed, kindly let me know. However, the case seems to me overwhelming even in estimate.
Also, real economies aren't very efficient. They're especially slow at redistributing labour. (This is mainly the government's fault too.)
Finally,
I don't think academics are stupid. I think they are indeed experts, but not at academics. They're experts at fellating their patron, the state. Even if every fact they propound is true - and I rarely have reason to doubt that - they are liars, because the expertise their authority is supposed to be derived from is a lie. These supposed economists are neither trained nor equipped to understand economics, which is why some random asshole can be better at it than they are.
Their lies are truly exquisite, though. As a representative,
Just as the Republicants exist only to give Demobrat voters something to fear, the dispute exists to be refuted.
I would like to see a social graph of the authors cited in this survey, because it beggars my imagination to assume they gained entry solely on merit. (Long, try page 6, number 47. Step 93 on page 10 is also key. Via.) Starting with whether the authors are married. Similarly, it would likely be informative to discover how the con-side dissenters' views changed over time, and whether that was correlated with career.
We will see none of this highly relevant information in any article, academic or jounalistic.
Tribal affiliation warning: I still maintain immigration is none of your business until an immigrant imposes externalities on your property, and then you should have the right to sue. It is the immigrant's sponsor's responsibility to make sure they impose no externalities, or to pay in advance for indulgences.
This is instead a screed against the economist and academic tribes, because their tribal norms enrich them at everyone else's expense. In this case, some random asshole from the internet notices a hole larger than any factor the supposed experts actually accounted for.
In an efficient market immigrants would be good, because labour isn't like other goods. Each immigrant would work hard enough to make their own stuff and then some - society would gain from the excess. However, we know that most immigrants are not high-value workers; they have a small surplus at the best of times.
The government taxes. The government provides benefits. Is there any chance that the government doesn't cost society more per immigrant than the immigrant provides in surplus?
Of course, each immigrant provides votes, and even illegals provide sales tax. In other words, the government - those who by definition have the power to determine immigration - gains money and power cost-free for every immigrant.
Don't forget that sovereign accounting is weird. They essentially don't have to pay for benefits, because it is funded by inflation. However, more taxes means that the individuals involved in government have more to influence and more to skim from.
To check my conclusion, the first search hit seemed sufficient.
"On average, immigrants appear to have a minor positive net fi…scal effect for host countries. Of course, these benefits are not uniformly distributed across the native population and sectors of the economy."My reading: immigrants cost society benefits, but it's okay because they pay slightly more in taxes.
So, the government taxes or inflates, then provides services with these dollars. Taxes have deadweight costs, and public provision costs 10-100 times as much as a comparable private provision, especially accounted in terms of stuff.
Then, it turns around and taxes immigrants. With more deadweight costs. On the margin, it uses these taxes to hinder pre-existing wealth-creation activities.
These effects are not accounted for in the official studies.
But, I'll in turn check my reading...
"Borjas and Trejo (1991) calculated that the average immigrant family costs $13.5k for the welfare system over the course of their US stay, compared to the $7.9k cost of a native family.Did you notice the reverse broken window fallacy? They included things easy to calculate, but assumed nothing was spent on the more difficult factors. Even setting aside the natural wealth-destroying properties of government action, they haven't included the cost of public education, wear on public roads, (both the immigrants and the trucks supplying their stuff) subsidized water mains, government provision of electricity...
Baker and Benjamin (1995) found the Canadian experience to be somewhat different. Immigrants, apart from refugees, consumed less unemployment benefits, social security, and housing support than natives."
Haha, oops. They found the conclusion they wanted, then stopped. If they hadn't found it, they would have kept looking, or, Robert Putnam style, not published.
In turn, if there's anything I've missed, kindly let me know. However, the case seems to me overwhelming even in estimate.
Also, real economies aren't very efficient. They're especially slow at redistributing labour. (This is mainly the government's fault too.)
"On the other hand, some more recent studies have found larger effects, and many studies note that the negative effects are concentrated on certain parts of the native population. The parts of the population most typically affected are the less-educated natives"Fancy that.
Finally,
"Immigration levels and ‡flows for some Northern European countries have a relative strength on par with traditional destination countries like the US. These …significant economic magnitudes, combined with Europe's ageing population, make immigration a …first-order policy question and research concern. Empirical lessons are drawn from several literature strands."The effects can be safely assumed to be big.
I don't think academics are stupid. I think they are indeed experts, but not at academics. They're experts at fellating their patron, the state. Even if every fact they propound is true - and I rarely have reason to doubt that - they are liars, because the expertise their authority is supposed to be derived from is a lie. These supposed economists are neither trained nor equipped to understand economics, which is why some random asshole can be better at it than they are.
Their lies are truly exquisite, though. As a representative,
"They also found that immigrants assimilated towards higher benefit incidence with duration of stay, a result that Crossley et al. (2001) later disputed."Academic dispute, between pro-immigration and anti-immigration! Without any conscious planning by anyone. Except, you can be sure it will come down on the pro side, because this is the only sentence where the disputant is mentioned immediately - the Kerrs is so uncomfortable with stating the con case that it cannot go unanswered. Note also the framing of the pro side as the dissenter...no single instances proves much of anything. But.
Just as the Republicants exist only to give Demobrat voters something to fear, the dispute exists to be refuted.
I would like to see a social graph of the authors cited in this survey, because it beggars my imagination to assume they gained entry solely on merit. (Long, try page 6, number 47. Step 93 on page 10 is also key. Via.) Starting with whether the authors are married. Similarly, it would likely be informative to discover how the con-side dissenters' views changed over time, and whether that was correlated with career.
We will see none of this highly relevant information in any article, academic or jounalistic.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Trust of Authority Corrupts Authority
I figured out why I don't like authority, and for once it's rational instead of psychological.
I should make a distinction between authority as coordinator of obedience and moral authority.
Those who trust and value authority per se fight against the questioning of the authority. Their authorities have no incentive to remain authoritative, and sooner or later will lose whatever virtue they first used to claim authority. In particular, trusting moral authority destroys the moral part, leaving only the shell of obedience.
Valuing authority inherently destroys authority.
Whenever someone says authority has moral value, I only hear the distant stomping of jackboots. The truth is the opposite - moral value has authority. The speaker of truth borrows the authority of truth, the words do not gain authority from their speaker.
I should make a distinction between authority as coordinator of obedience and moral authority.
Those who trust and value authority per se fight against the questioning of the authority. Their authorities have no incentive to remain authoritative, and sooner or later will lose whatever virtue they first used to claim authority. In particular, trusting moral authority destroys the moral part, leaving only the shell of obedience.
Valuing authority inherently destroys authority.
Whenever someone says authority has moral value, I only hear the distant stomping of jackboots. The truth is the opposite - moral value has authority. The speaker of truth borrows the authority of truth, the words do not gain authority from their speaker.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Think Space is Cool? Scrap NASA
Even not taking into account the disproportionately wealth-destroying effects of tax-style funding, even not taking into account regulation friction, even not taking into account the broken window fallacy and assuming the best probable rocket was the existing Titan rocket...
NASA destroyed nine space missions for every shuttle mission they flew. They could have literally saved money by buying ten Titan rockets and simply exploding nine of them on the launchpad, and then launching the tenth instead of the shuttle. (No development costs, for example.) Saved even more money by simply setting it on fire. (No transport costs.)
Not to mention all the other things I can put after 'even not taking into account.'
Just in case you thought NASA was ever about space, not political egos and horse-trading.
In every case I've examined, it is a strict improvement to set money on fire instead of giving it to a government program. Space exploration missions probably cost less than 1% of what NASA has to spend, because no doubt a similar analysis could be carried out on the Titan rocket itself, if only we could pierce the broken-window veil.
NASA destroyed nine space missions for every shuttle mission they flew. They could have literally saved money by buying ten Titan rockets and simply exploding nine of them on the launchpad, and then launching the tenth instead of the shuttle. (No development costs, for example.) Saved even more money by simply setting it on fire. (No transport costs.)
Not to mention all the other things I can put after 'even not taking into account.'
Just in case you thought NASA was ever about space, not political egos and horse-trading.
In every case I've examined, it is a strict improvement to set money on fire instead of giving it to a government program. Space exploration missions probably cost less than 1% of what NASA has to spend, because no doubt a similar analysis could be carried out on the Titan rocket itself, if only we could pierce the broken-window veil.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Free Will vs. God of the Gaps
My initial experiment was watching defences of determinism submitted to New Scientist's letters section, which I noticed had to keep retreating.
My ultimate conclusion is that in practical terms, these supposed opposites are indistinguishable. The question has been pushed out of physics entirely. Things like the Newcomb's Box situation, which depend on one or the other, are not only prohibitively expensive, but actually forbidden. In turn it means that things like responsibility and punishment should function indistinguishably under the two possibilities; which I have previously worked out to be true. More generally, you can believe you're deterministic or not at your pleasure.
However, it is the determinist who must alter their beliefs about the world, because the libertarian was correct about the universe being unpredictable. Even though the libertarian case is pending a good definition, the determinist-physicalist position has been pushed off the table entirely.
At the bottom, I investigate the epistemic implications.
At first, supposedly if we knew everything about neurons, human behaviour was supposed to be precisely predictable. This turned out not to be sufficient, so it became cells, which became particles. Particles has since fallen, (via) which incidentally has implications for many-worlds interpretations.
Indeed there appear to be multiple ways to reach this conclusion.
That said, there must be some shortcuts, because some predictions can be made. The fact that you aren't daily surprised by your confederates disproves this;
There's no physical difference between an unpredictable system and an indeterminate system. Simply put, the prediction computers are part of physics, made of physics; if physics wants to know what it'll do, it's out of luck too. For me to be sure of what you'll do I have to wait for you to do it, and for physics to know what physics will do, it has to go and do it. As an example, imagine two electrons, one of which is unpredictable, the other, random. From any point except the electron in question, can you think of an experiment to tell the difference?
(Hmm, I think I just figured out how to precisely define free will.)
Even if physics is ultimately deterministic in some sense, it is not possible to notice. That said, there may still be a philosophical line of inquiry.
Though these lines of evidence seem independent, since they all point to the exact same conclusion, they must be related. They are likely different facets of some underlying truth.
Epistemics
Given that we now know the two are indistinguishable, was there an easier way we could have found that out?
Causality.
For free will to exist, it must be causally linked to physics. Let's use the example of going for a walk to buy milk, or not, as the case may be. From the perspective of physics, which is implementing the transaction, is there any way to tell the difference between a chosen cause of a milk run and an unchosen cause? There isn't; there can't be. The thing, whatever it is, must plug the same way into the same socket.
(Just a tad shorter than doing it the hard way.)
That the two were indistinguishable was a conclusion available to Socrates and Aristotle. Charitably, I'm going to say they were busy and that's why they didn't get around to figuring it out. Though modern understandings of physics are certainly a big help; that just means Hume could have figured it out and didn't, and he wasn't as busy as Aristotle. Spent too much time arguing with people and not with reality.
This is also corroboration. The upward and downward conclusions are matching.
My ultimate conclusion is that in practical terms, these supposed opposites are indistinguishable. The question has been pushed out of physics entirely. Things like the Newcomb's Box situation, which depend on one or the other, are not only prohibitively expensive, but actually forbidden. In turn it means that things like responsibility and punishment should function indistinguishably under the two possibilities; which I have previously worked out to be true. More generally, you can believe you're deterministic or not at your pleasure.
However, it is the determinist who must alter their beliefs about the world, because the libertarian was correct about the universe being unpredictable. Even though the libertarian case is pending a good definition, the determinist-physicalist position has been pushed off the table entirely.
"Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are not logically incompatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers"Epistemology is not democracy. There's no reason for libertarians to look for a way to make their views compatible with something that has been proven wrong, especially when the views, properly understood, have no known actionable conclusions that their beliefs could misguide them into.
At the bottom, I investigate the epistemic implications.
At first, supposedly if we knew everything about neurons, human behaviour was supposed to be precisely predictable. This turned out not to be sufficient, so it became cells, which became particles. Particles has since fallen, (via) which incidentally has implications for many-worlds interpretations.
Indeed there appear to be multiple ways to reach this conclusion.
"The point is: predicting the system's behavior requires us to compute the future state more quickly than nature does. For that, we need to build a computer that outpaces nature. If we would attempt building a computer capable of doing so, we would soon discover that this computer collapses and forms a black hole long before it reaches the required size."Let me put it a third way. Let's say to predict the outcome of your brain requires ten information. However, crossing the boundary of your skull is only six information. To find out the other four would mean investigating the circumstances of your brain's creation, which means gathering, what, like 100? 1000? (No, way more than that.) By which time I need an entirely new ten information, because your brain has moved on. But it is even worse than this, because;
"Key factor in the above argument is that the system needs to be 'sufficiently complex'. In practice this means that he system needs to have a strong tendency of amplifying tiny causes into large effects. A human brain - with eyes and ears connected to it - certainly has that tendency."I need not just the ten information about your neurons, but all the information in your environment that those neurons may be fed with. To do that, I need the information about the environment's environment, so I can predict the environment, and to do that...well, you see where the black hole comes from.
That said, there must be some shortcuts, because some predictions can be made. The fact that you aren't daily surprised by your confederates disproves this;
"The thing is: given the fundamental laws of physics, for a system of sufficient complexity you can not predict its future. For that to happen you need a shortcut to describe the deterministic evolution of our universe. However, such a shortcut does not exist."You don't need the universe as a whole because effects diminish with distance. Just as 99% of an electron's probability can be found within a few angstroms, 99% of the contributions to human action can be found on Earth or its immediate surroundings.
There's no physical difference between an unpredictable system and an indeterminate system. Simply put, the prediction computers are part of physics, made of physics; if physics wants to know what it'll do, it's out of luck too. For me to be sure of what you'll do I have to wait for you to do it, and for physics to know what physics will do, it has to go and do it. As an example, imagine two electrons, one of which is unpredictable, the other, random. From any point except the electron in question, can you think of an experiment to tell the difference?
(Hmm, I think I just figured out how to precisely define free will.)
Even if physics is ultimately deterministic in some sense, it is not possible to notice. That said, there may still be a philosophical line of inquiry.
Though these lines of evidence seem independent, since they all point to the exact same conclusion, they must be related. They are likely different facets of some underlying truth.
Epistemics
Given that we now know the two are indistinguishable, was there an easier way we could have found that out?
Causality.
For free will to exist, it must be causally linked to physics. Let's use the example of going for a walk to buy milk, or not, as the case may be. From the perspective of physics, which is implementing the transaction, is there any way to tell the difference between a chosen cause of a milk run and an unchosen cause? There isn't; there can't be. The thing, whatever it is, must plug the same way into the same socket.
(Just a tad shorter than doing it the hard way.)
That the two were indistinguishable was a conclusion available to Socrates and Aristotle. Charitably, I'm going to say they were busy and that's why they didn't get around to figuring it out. Though modern understandings of physics are certainly a big help; that just means Hume could have figured it out and didn't, and he wasn't as busy as Aristotle. Spent too much time arguing with people and not with reality.
This is also corroboration. The upward and downward conclusions are matching.
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