I’m privileged to know Vennie. You’re going to hear a lot more from her.
Watch out.
You’ll see what I mean when you read her recent article (click below)…
I’m privileged to know Vennie. You’re going to hear a lot more from her.
Watch out.
You’ll see what I mean when you read her recent article (click below)…
Posted in Uncategorized
Rockefeller’s “Just a little bit more…” answer to, “How much money is enough?” gives a peek into the mind of the so-called “rich”.
Hoarders hoard for inordinate fear of loss or scarcity. Excessive, yet still within the realm of the understandable. They want to have stuff because they see value in the stuff itself. We see a problem with that not because it’s hoarding, but because we don’t agree with their sense of what’s valuable. When it comes to things we consider valuable — like money or gold or art — hoarding suddenly doesn’t seem inordinate to us, but instead makes all kinds of sense. Either way, hoarders or those who (naively?) think they’re not hoarders, most people key in on the intrinsic value of the stuff in question.
Not so for the fools we call “rich” — they hoard stuff for a completely different reason. Read More…
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Objectivity is a myth because it rests on profoundly fallacious beliefs at multiple levels.
First, the belief that human beings can attain objectivity is a myth. No one has demonstrated that objectivity is more than marginally attainable, so its attainability is mostly a matter of faith. We have shown that we can use rather laborious methods to mitigate the effects of the enemies of objectivity: preferences and passions and preconceptions and drives and predilections and biases and obsessions and the like. Science is one of those methods. But the belief that these methods can achieve objectivity rests on a fallacy that confuses mitigating effects with changing the causes of those effects. None of our methods even attempts to change the causes of the foibles that objectivity aims to neutralize. Reducing effects of subjective tendencies is not the same as becoming objective, but a far cry short of it. And in the case of human beings, the very tendencies that objectivity aims to neutralize are integral to what it means to be human. We distinguish humans from other animals in large part precisely because of our capacity for the very things that objectivity mitigates. What do beings without preferences and passions and preconceptions and drives and predilections and biases and obsessions look like? Zombies or robots. Neutralizing human subjectivity would be to neutralize human nature.
Second, the belief that objectivity is desirable is a myth. Read More…
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Your beliefs are all wrong, all of yours and mine too.
Not just off. Not just some. Statistically speaking, all of them and all of us.
That’s not a slam. It’s a fact.
Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.
— David Russell Schilling, Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months
So by the time knowledge doubles every 12 hours, and then every 6 hours, and then every 3 hours, so much new knowledge will pile up so fast that everything you or I “know” will become statistically negligible — not even significant enough to be either right or wrong in the overall scheme.
The belief that somehow, magically or accidentally, most of what you now think you know will agree with what will be known then is about as reasonable as “knowing” that your next lottery ticket will certainly be the winner. Actually, your chances of being right about the lottery ticket are much higher.
Consider the following chart (click to enlarge)…
Most computational neuroscientists estimate human storage capacity somewhere between 10 terabytes and 100 terabytes. That’s the MOST you can know. Some even stretch it to 2.5 petabytes. Let’s split the difference and call human brain capacity an even 1 petabyte (New Zealand on the chart). That’s the most you can EVER know, because yo’ po’ li’l noggin just cain’ts hold n’more…
The annual production of information stands at 1500 petabytes. That’s 1.5 suns to your puny New Zealand. And the information/knowledge sun is entering supernova. Your brain is not. Soon the comparative metaphor will be the orbit of Pluto compared to New Zealand. You can’t even see Earth from Pluto, let alone tiny NZ.
But yet you’re willing to argue, fight, lose friends, alienate, disparage, demonize, or do other irreparable harm to your fellow human beings for the sake of a belief or an ideal?
Well then, you’re a fucking idiot (but there’s hope!) 🙂
I’d rather just be honestly wrong.
Posted in Freedom, Musings, Psychology, Reversal | Tags: Freedom, Musings, Psychology, Reversal, Technology, Thoughts
We need to think simply and clearly about what ownership truly is.
How is ownership established? We might think that we acquire ownership of property from its current owner — that we offer to buy it or trade something for it, the current owner agrees, the exchange is made, and now we are the new owner. That is not how ownership is established, but rather how it gets transferred.
Ownership is originally established by seizure. Property or the material resources from which we create property were, at some point in the past, not owned by anyone. The origination of ownership of that property was an act of fiat, i.e., an arbitrary decree. Someone, sometime declared himself its owner. Before that there was no owner. After that, he was the owner. No one else declared him owner, because that implies the party making the declaration was the owner, and then we’d have to ask how that party became the owner. The provenance of ownership is always a self-bestowed, arbitrary, unilateral right of confiscation of resources that constitutes them as our property.
Some might think that intellectual property is an exception to this, as if the creator is the de facto owner by virtue of creation and the creation is automatically the creator’s property. Of course this is far from the case. Through the 20th Century, creation did not constitute ownership. Copyright, contract, and patent grants did. Creators invariably signed over any rights to their creations to publishers, record labels, movie producers, or other employer. Over the last few decades creators have asserted their ownership rights citing creator status as an argument, which ipso facto indicates their status as creators was insufficient alone to establish ownership. So, both tangible and intangible property is established by confiscation legitimized by law.
So ownership is in fact indistinguishable from theft, except that theft is a self-bestowed, arbitrary, unilateral right of confiscation of property from a current owner, while the original act establishing ownership was a self-bestowed, arbitrary, unilateral right of confiscate resources that no one had yet laid claim to. The self-entitlement of ownership, the confiscation of the resources, and the consequent deprivation of others who now are denied rights to the newly constituted property are the same in both cases. The only difference is whether or not this was the first rights self-entitlement and confiscation. This demonstrates an intrinsic incoherence in the concept of ownership: We consider the original confiscation as legitimate, but we consider every subsequent confiscation to be illegitimate solely because it wasn’t the first.
This means that we consider the significance of the actual acts of entitling ourselves to resources, confiscating them, the consequences of these actions, and the resources themselves all as secondary to the issue of right of ownership of them as property. Diminishing the realities involved in real actions taken by subordinating them Read More…
Posted in Finances, Freedom, Lifestyle, Politics, Relationships, Reversal, Revolution, Society | Tags: Business, Community, Finances, Freedom, Lifestyle, Money, Personal Freedom, Politics, Relationships, Reversal, Revolution, Society, Violence
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