192 karma · joined September 18, 2015
I really don't think I am, I'm trying to tell you that you keep referencing subjective values as if they can be assessed objectively. An example from the comment above is the following subjective value implied as an objective value: a long life is a better life than a not long life. I know it may sound preposterous but for every scenario we could imagine there is always a way to look at an action as a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, even chugging rat poison. Perhaps the results of my death from poisoning is that someone else is able to survive due to the whatever circumstances surround the scenario; in this case I may be balancing the value of my own continued existence against that of someone else's and you want to tell me you there's a framework that is somehow going to guide me into making an objectively correct choice about who lives and dies?
> Objectivism deductively and inductively proves that certain actions are an objective good for the soul as a condition of being human
I disagree with this wholeheartedly.
I have seen zero proof of this and I really don't think it can be proved because the objective universe does not track goodness in any way, it is a concept defined entirely within our minds and does not have an objective physical reference we can test or compare against.
What is it "to live"? Even more of a mystery is what is it to "maximally live"? You are reducing all of life to a single dimension that you haven't even defined. There may be an objective minimum amount of calories that are necessary to stay alive/awake but I don't think that raw survival is super relevant here; what value is there in intaking a single one beyond that? The things that make us happy at one point in our lives aren't necessarily always going to make us happy, in fact our ideas of what it is to be happy can easily fluctuate throughout our lives, and definitely do fluctuate from person to person. There's very little in this world that is as cut and dry as you seem to imply.
I think maybe this is a hard pill to swallow for many people because we have proven over and over that we can't trust each other to both know this AND still treat everyone, regardless of how we may be able to classify them, as an individual and to judge each individual by their own actions, desires, and capabilities rather than by the average characteristics of whatever bucket we happen to be considering them to be in at the time.
Given that, violet appears to be between red and blue in the same way the pitch of G appears to be between the pitches F and A.
1. There are no other concerns that we can gather info about besides "UBI might cause so much inflation that it cancels itself out" and
2. Nothing can be learned from these experiments unless they prove that the concern in #1 is unfounded.
This is just obstructionism. Using less than 100% accurate simulations to attempt to predict the outcome of implementing actions and to inform our choices has been common practice since the dawn of civilization, there's no reason that the tool is suddenly completely useless in this particular situation. This isn't a "hard science". We have massive problems with poverty and economic inequality in our society and statements like these only serve to stop the conversation that potentially leads to solving them. Why do people seem so stubbornly against seeing if a UBI works?
It's funny that you quoted this line because I think it reveals a particular ignorance that the author has, namely a misunderstanding of depression due to her particular experience with it. A more truthful version, in my view, would be the following:
When you’re not depressed, you want things: work, love, children. When you have mild depression, you want to want things. When you’re deeply depressed, you no longer want anything.
Age really doesn't have anything to do with it.