marxism: the value of a good is the labor put into it; thus, the more inefficient the process to create a good, the more valuable it is. now i understand how inefficiency can be considered a economic virtue.
everyone agrees that the more inefficient the process to create a good, the more expensive it is. however, to jump to marx' conclusion, you must equate price/net worth with inherent value, which is something we usually accuse capitalists of doing (think Rent).
is the same soup more valuable if too many cooks were working on it, making it was more expensive?
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note: adam smith wouldve agreed with marx on this one. it isnt a partisan idea, it's just outdated. the question is, who is being "progressive," and who is holding on to a flawed definition rhetorically? trying to fix the old definition just makes it exogenous.
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some soundbites
1. On why I am not an "angry atheist"
When tracing all the world's problems back to religious intolerance, one forgets the big picture: religion only manifests and exacerbates pre-existing regional bigotry.
People are very well able to wage 1000-year-old blood wars (think central Europe) and be radically sexist (think China) without religion!
2. On the existence of choice in the context of the inevitability of causality (ie, behaviorism)
The question of inevitability, choice, and irreconcilablity is essentially trivial. Of course all our choices are based solely on our experiences, circumstances and predispositions, what else could they be based on? To say our actions come from an entity called choice is tautological--we are creating the concept and defining it true.
So if we want to know "whether choice exists," instead of considering our meaning of "choice," we should consider our meaning of "exists."
I consider choice to be a form of emergence, in other words a complex system/pattern arising out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. I mean emergent in a very loose way, like how the laws of chemistry emerge from particle physics in a way we don't understand. Some people consider emergent patterns to be illusions, others consider them to be entities unto themselves. Thus whether choice exists depends on your personal definition of "exists," but on a non-semantic level we all agree.
Today I went to a lecture on the American pro-Israel lobby by a controversial author and Harvard professor. Afterwards there was a Q&A, and in some ways those hostile questions themselves were more revealing than the answers. From this talk I've learned two things:
When tracing all the world's problems back to religious intolerance, one forgets the big picture: religion only manifests and exacerbates pre-existing regional bigotry.
People are very well able to wage 1000-year-old blood wars (think central Europe) and be radically sexist (think China) without religion!
2. On the existence of choice in the context of the inevitability of causality (ie, behaviorism)
The question of inevitability, choice, and irreconcilablity is essentially trivial. Of course all our choices are based solely on our experiences, circumstances and predispositions, what else could they be based on? To say our actions come from an entity called choice is tautological--we are creating the concept and defining it true.
So if we want to know "whether choice exists," instead of considering our meaning of "choice," we should consider our meaning of "exists."
I consider choice to be a form of emergence, in other words a complex system/pattern arising out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. I mean emergent in a very loose way, like how the laws of chemistry emerge from particle physics in a way we don't understand. Some people consider emergent patterns to be illusions, others consider them to be entities unto themselves. Thus whether choice exists depends on your personal definition of "exists," but on a non-semantic level we all agree.
Today I went to a lecture on the American pro-Israel lobby by a controversial author and Harvard professor. Afterwards there was a Q&A, and in some ways those hostile questions themselves were more revealing than the answers. From this talk I've learned two things:
- I will NEVER go into middle-east policy--you can't win
- I should go to more academic lectures, they really get the juices flowing!
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