Spy among Friends.

For a well-known (although perhaps not popular) statistical guru, Nassim Taleb is worth while.

No empirical experiment can prove or disprove the existence of free will without first explicitly laying out sufficient definitions of free, will and self. BTW I’m agreeing.

This is an excellent thread, lots of great comments. You can’t even begin to untangle the semantics of free will, without first clarifying the concept of an embodied “I”.

I’d say that flow is autotelic, but I’m not sure it would be considered a personality trait.

I agree, but there are certain nuances to flow, not all flows are equally beneficial. At one extreme you have a junkie in a flow state as they very single mindedly focus on the search for their next fix. Less counter productive than an addiction to drugs is an addiction to the flow state provided by video games.

I’d also suggest a subtle distinction between flow and Wu Wei. Wu Wei is more about effortless action, while flow is more about a continuous stream of focussed attention, but if not brother and sister they are first cousins.

I recall another thread where a bunch from the no AI community, were planning to flood social media with Mickey Mouse AI generated stuff to precipitate some kind of legal storm that would clarify the IP issues.

I thought it worth a quick read. Two points:

“the foundational recognition that nature, including conscious human nature, is inherently intelligent”; If this is foundational, then the argument topples quickly. Nature is “selective” not intelligent. Lots of good arguments for the idea that we didn’t evolve to be rational, we evolved to survive. Intelligence and rationality are consequential, or emergent, not fundamental.

Second: given the way the world works, including our basic biology, hierarchies are inevitable, and ubiquitous. A functional anarchist society would be populated by non-humans.

Recognizing the truth of the claim that if you have to resort to analogy, you’ve lost the argument, I’m unable to avoid suggesting that an ant colony or bee hive is …more like… (but not equivalent to) an anarchistic society than any potential human anachronistic society could be. See my next/last point, but the ants and bees do what they do without force or coercion, or the execution of power, ie absent all the so called shortcomings supposedly ameliorated by anarchism. They are simply driven, as a species, as we are, as a species in aggregate, by biology.

And finally, I get the feeling that if the argument went further it could be easily repurposed as an attempt to evidence libertarian free will.

Whether or not a piece of what looks like garbage abandoned on the street, might have some value, sentimental or other, is not a good reason to claim that this particular “X according to reason is valuable among (sic) others”, regardless of the value it might or might not have for me. I am disagreeing with the OP’s general assertion of value.

Even if that is literally the definition of their job?

Ok,I’ll go even farther, value is only relevant at the margin. The vale of something is based on the consequence of having one unit more or one unit less, and this will vary according to circumstances.

Oxygen is of value, but the difference in value from someone who doesn’t have enough, and for someone who has never experienced scarcity is such that you don’t get much traction from asserting, albeit truthfully, that oxygen is valuable.

Once you include my feelings as a source or metric of value, you end up on a very slippery slope.

Which ties back to my finger painting. If I lost it on the street and it was found by a street cleaner, or anyone for that matter, how much value would they attribute to the actual finger painting. I think you conflate the value attributed to the physical object vs the value that some others might, or might not, attribute to my subjective sense of loss.

But I’m curious, if the quote I referenced is false, does the argument fall?

Ok but it is not “valuable among others”.

I’ll only respond to one quote: “If the skeptic says his X is valuable, then according to reason, X is valuable among others.”

Clearly false. I have a finger painting I did as a 3 year old (and now have no living relatives), that finger is valuable to me but no one else. Don’t know what this does to the basic argument proposed, but caused me to lose interest.

Excellent point. Mark Solms, author of Hidden Spring, makes a similar claim for play, particularly in the formative years.

I suspect that if we unwound that inequality, the unhappiness index would increase.

Well, the wealth was created somewhere by someone, and the generic creation of wealth is ultimately manifest in our social hierarchies. Note the context of my comment was a response to a previous post. Of course, other factors impact our social hierarchies as well, our DNA being the most obvious example. I’ll also note in passing that ontologically competence is a hierarchy.

My basic point is that the majority of time, the vast majority, targeting “hierarchies” for almost any critical sociological purpose is aiming at the wrong target, because the fundamental cause of the general angst on display (which seems to be mostly self indulgence) is simply our nature as biological beings.

Marxists, for all their talk of inevitable history, have a fundamentally flawed understanding of hierarchies in general.

And here I had you figured for my mommy.

The prevalent social hierarchy is the result of competence in obtaining wealth.

Hierarchies arise naturally, and inevitably in the real world regardless of what or how we feel, or what pronouns we use.

I enjoyed the article, what follows is context, not criticism.

If you come across an article that contains what seem to be large numbers, or infinities (which I did’t see here) take a minute to get at least a sense of what really large numbers are like, (or small numbers as the inverse of a really large number) Numberphile has some good videos on Graham’s number and Tree Three. These really large numbers provide a useful context. If an author pulls out what seems to be a small probability, appreciate how massive that “small” probability is compared to the range of possible really small probabilities.

Raises an interesting question: What is (a decent model of) the time value of suffering?