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Song of Apollo - Conference review
| Jul. 25th, 2005 08:38 am Conference review You've seen the pictures - now my thoughts on the lectures:
1) Stephen Hicks and Lyman Hazelton gave the best talks. Hicks' first lecture on Rand and Nietzsche was especially lucid. Hazelton's coverage of chaos theory and its philosophical implications was excellent as well, although his use of non-objectivist-standard terminology confused some in the audience and led to misunderstandings.
2) I was supremely disappointed in Madeline Cosman's lecture on Illegal Immigration & American Medicine. She wants to seal the country and arrest Americans who aid or deal with illegal immigrants in any way. She wants a police state. The contentious issue of immigration - legal or illegal - is so easy, so simple to understand from basic principles of liberty. I can't believe an Objectivist could so easily fall down on it.
The status quo is that immigration is generally illegal in this country - the vast majority of people around the world that would like to come here cannot legally do so. We are fighting a War on Immigration, much like the War on Drugs. And just as drugs should be legal, immigration should be legal - because both are peaceful activities (using or selling drugs, flying from Mexico City to Detroit, etc.)
If you take the non-initiation of force principle seriously as a guide for your political system, you can't seriously consider making immigration a crime, because you would be initiating force against millions of peaceful foreigners, as well as millions of Americans that would like to trade with them. This is just so basic. It would be, and is, tyranny. In a free society, all peaceful activity must be legal by default.
One of her complaints was the cost to hospitals of illegals overusing the ERs. Hospitals are forced to take these patients, who they know will not pay. The problem then, are the laws that force hospitals to take patients against their will, and more broadly, the welfare state itself. These are the root causes, not immigration per se. Again, so obvious.
Another one of her fearmongering points was that immigrants are bringing all sorts of horrible diseases to America, but she failed to present any data that demonstrated statistical significance. There was no reason to care about the issue based on what she presented.
She made no attempt to weigh the costs of the police state she proposed against the benefits, or against the costs of the status quo illegal immigration / welfare state situation.
Even if you ignored the principles of liberty, and just looked at it from cost-benefit-feasibility perspective, trying to close the borders (unsuccessfully to be sure) and arrest Americans for dealing with illegals is an incredibly bad choice compared to eliminating welfare programs and healthcare regulations. The economic costs of any half-successful attempt to seal this country like a ziploc bag would be disastrous - it simply is not in our best interests to eliminate free trade in labor. And the costs to our liberty would be commensurate with those we suffer from the drug war.
Objectivists should know better. They should have strong libertarian instincts (and an explicitly libertarian political philosophy), able to slice through issues like this in about three seconds. I thought I was in a safe harbor at an objectivist conference, safe from the tribalist - and oftentimes racist - opponents of immigration that I've encountered among the conservative rank-and-file in Arizona. It was saddening to see several conference attendess exhibit such a conservative, reflexively collectivist, approach to the immigration issue as they lapped up Cosman's fearmongering.
3) I really didn't like John Davis' talk on objectivist rituals and ceremonies. It wasn't well developed. You can't just take existing religious rituals and change the words. I actually had to leave the room during the mock wedding because it was so bad. These people were telling each other, in their vows, stuff like:
Reason is our only absolute
I'm attracted to you because of your commitment to reality
I'm attracted to you because of your self-esteem
I'm attracted to you because of your productiveness
Aahhhh! Stop! I had to vacate at that point. Here's the problem, people. This is a WEDDING. It should be poetic and inspired. It should feel natural, loving, and warm - very, very warm. It should not be a didactic event, or a philosophy lecture. You're attracted to a lot of people. You don't marry someone because you're attracted to them. You marry them because you love them, and want to spend the rest of your life with them.
Vows should reflect that - they should be full of passion and love and warmth and cuteness. And there should be something a little bit goofy and lighthearted in there somewhere too. I really liked reading about Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's wedding years ago. In the vows, one of them promised to make the other's favorite banana milkshake. That's so cool, and a nice close to deeper sentiments.
4) I really enjoyed Will Thomas' talk on the ways and means of friendship - some things there I hadn't thought of. And his presentation style was so polished, with a nice pace and delivery - very noticeable compared to others.
5) The Will and David lectures on objectivity were good, even though I felt like it was all familiar territory. 7 comments - Leave a comment    | |
 | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) madbard |
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| Date: | July 25th, 2005 05:44 pm (UTC) |
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The basis for stopping foreigners from entering the country is self-defense. As I told many people at the conference, if you want to see the issue clearly, imagine that the US shared a border with Pakistan. I also have no problem stopping people at the border who haven't passed an inspection for infectuous diseases, if they're coming from a poverty-stricken country like Mexico.
You're right in that the primary problem in many of the issues Madeline Cosman mentioned is the welfare state, not immigration per se. But the existince of the welfare state does give us additional incentive to enforce the already-justified immigration laws.
It's worth noting that Cosman explicitly said we should welcome immigrants, provided they're legal.
The national defense angle would be important if we bordered Pakistan. However, the present reality provides no real national defense concern, certainly none that could be remedied by anti-immigration policies. The people streaming into America are not hostiles. It is not possible to seal our border against a handful of terrorists who intend to enter on foot. Better to go out into the world and kill them where they live, not turn ourselves into a police state.
In the present context, there's no need to fret over whether someone is "legal". Why would a liberty-loving objectivist care? It's an unjust law, and it's simply not possible for most good people to come here legally. Given the personal contexts of most of the immigrants who come from poor countries, their decision to enter illegally is a profoundly rational one, and commendable. I would act similarly in their shoes.
I'm fine with disease screening. But the point is to legalize immigration. So if someone has no criminal record, is not on a watchlist, and is disease-free, we need to ~let them in~. We need to make immigration completely legal under such circumstance. Presently, it is not.
Dr. Hazelton's talk was interesting, but he said a few things that were misleading or wrong. First, chaos is as unpredictable as he made it sound. For any particular chaotic system, there is a certain amount of precision you need in your initial measurements to know what it's going to do in a second or a minute. There is no upper bound on the amount of precision you might need for any particular system, but it is possible to predict what it will do.
That's epistemological uncertainty. Metaphysical uncertainty is when you just can't know what something is going to do because, even if you knew everything there is to know, the thing involves chance. He was incorrectly claiming that chaos is metaphysically uncertain. I believe (like Hazelton) that QM is actually metaphysically uncertain; but he hurt the claim about QM by describing chaos so similarly.
Finally, what was all this stuff about consciousness requiring randomness? I've read about Penrose (the guy who thinks consciousness is a QM phenomenon), and it all looks like a bunch of hype and baseless speculation. Hazelton didn't give much of an argument as to why consciousness requires randomness except to say that consciousness is a complex system. So what? You don't need randomness to get complexity! I think Tibor Machan nailed his counter-argument to this point.
I agree with 2, 3, and 4. Those were some of the highlights/lowlights for me as well.
When you say: "First, chaos is as unpredictable as he made it sound." ...I assume you meant is ~not~ as unpredictable...
So, when you say there is a certain amount of precision needed in your measurements to predict, and that there is no upper bound on the amount of precision you might need, how do I reconcile those two ideas? We are speaking of the same system in both cases, right? It seems like a contradiction to say, at a certain amount of precision in measurement, you can predict - and to say there is no upper bound to the precision you need in order to predict...
I don't get his cognitive model either. When and where did Tibor counter-argue?
 | | From: | scottsch |
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| Date: | July 25th, 2005 09:34 pm (UTC) |
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When you say: "First, chaos is as unpredictable as he made it sound." ...I assume you meant is ~not~ as unpredictable...
Oops, right.
So, when you say there is a certain amount of precision needed in your measurements to predict, and that there is no upper bound on the amount of precision you might need, how do I reconcile those two ideas?
Sorry, I wasn't being precise enough. For any particular system (e.g. the double pendulum you let go yesterday at 2:30), you need a certain, finite amount of precision. But for a *type* of system (e.g. a double pendulum), you can always come up with instances of that system that require more and more precision. So if you want to know what the double pendulum will do on a certain run, after 10 seconds, you might need two decimal places on the measurements of the positions of the two weights. Or you might need 10, or 100, or a million. There is no upper bound on the # of decimal places you'll need for a double pendulum, but the # of decimal places you need is always finite.
When and where did Tibor counter-argue?
In his lecture: "Physics, Common Sense, and Philosophy". He said it doesn't make much sense to view consciousness as rising from randomness because people don't act randomly.
 | | From: | faustin |
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| Date: | July 26th, 2005 07:44 am (UTC) |
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I appreciated these comments --- though I wasn't there and didn't see the originals to which you're responding, I think I agree.
I wanted to ask you, we've never discussed it before, what did you think of my wedding vows?
I remember liking your vows a whole lot. The only line I remember is "Jung Min, I know your ways..." The ceremony overall was outstanding, clean, inspiring. The Jewish imports, the Dr Seuss reading, it was great.
I also remember that I feared you were abusing your power to invoke the sacred.
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