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All art is a statement of values. Even art that chooses to abstain from value statements.

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You can't instill manners by manipulating language. But you can instill ignorance.

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One area I have not seen libertarian or ancap fiction explore much: the necessity of contracts. In a society defined by individuals engaged in consensual exchange, the use of contracts to maintain expectations and accountability would be paramount. Contract law would therefore be like holy writ.

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Anger is a poor substitute for logic and righteousness a lacking replacement for facts.

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I'm quite certain Zhuang Zi would heartily approve of Discordianism. It fits his kind of humor.

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Per the law of pendulums, our current emphasis on gender neutral labeling will swing back into a resurgence of tightly defined gender roles that follow western stereotypes in about a decade or so.

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Those who hate humanity itself will always seek to tighten the noose of control - while trying to convince us that the rope is just a scarf we need to keep warm.

And it all starts with the phrase, "There should be a law..."

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The solution to moral panic is not the abolition of morality, but the acquisition of a better moral code.

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I reject any worldview with delicate sensibilities. A good system of philosophy should be able to handle a little rough housing around the edges.

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Person: "God is the ultimate scientist."

Me: "God is the ultimate MAD scientist would explain a lot."

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On my list of pet peeves: people who have read nothing but John Rawls and think that makes them a political philosophy expert. Ran into these types at Yale and Columbia; I react to them the same way Will Hunting did when confronting that blowhard about American history.

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"Be ashamed of your science, your consumption, and your quality of life! Fear them, resent them, cast them away and live as a primitive!"

"No."

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Nature is not inherently superior to the creations of man. Nor is it inherently inferior. Each comparison must be weighed on a case-by-case basis for its risk-benefit.

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"No one owes you anything just because you exist and have potential." - George Donnelly

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In Socialism, the people who say, "I need all this power to do good" are inevitably followed by the people who say, "I need all this power to do whatever I want." If you welcome the former, you will eventually have the latter - and usually sooner than you'd like.

Bias and Evidence

"I need evidence of your view before I believe it."

"You're just claiming to be skeptical because you haven't been exposed to the evidence!"

"That argument does not constitute the evidence I requested. My point stands."

Recently had this argument. Apparently you don't need to counter with evidence anymore, just say the person is biased and that's why they haven't seen it yet.

Fake Rights

"You don't have the right to do that."

"Sure I do! It's the right to public safety."

"That doesn't exist."

"Oh. Then, the right to protecting my community!"

"That's basically the same, but nope, not a thing."

"The right to stop people who look scary and act weird?"

"That's called 'profiling.' And it's definitely not a right."

"Look, just shut up and do what I say!"

"You know what is a right? My ability to tell you to go to hell."

Acceptable Beauty

There is nothing wrong with the creation and enjoyment of beauty. That is, the appreciation of what one considers beautiful. This can vary from person to person and there is a certain excitement when an artist or producer shares their vision of beauty with others. It both communicates their vision of the world and allows those who share that vision an outlet for what they might not have been able to express on their own.

For example, if I see an artist hold up something that is ugly and blighted and call it beautiful, I know that person has a very demented outlook on the world. Sometimes this can be fun - I was always a fan of JTHM, despite the deliberately ugly portrayals of humanity, because it was darkly humorous. But I know better than to declare it beautiful - it isn't (to me), and that's the point. There's also art I find unenjoyably ugly. Much of R. Crumb's work falls into that category along with large chunks of modern faire.

On the flip side, I enjoy stirring epic pieces and beautiful images and the artists capable of them. And there are people who regard that the same way I see Crumb. This is fine, since it's a matter of opinion - I just wouldn't trust them to create an art history field trip for me.

What there is too much of are people who want impose and enforce their vision of "acceptable" beauty on everyone. They want to limit what can and cannot be regarded as attractive and stirring. Some of them take the form of fashion police who want to mock women who wear glasses or who eschew greasy face paint. Others scream obscenity and oppression at artists who draw women with curved forms in provocative poses.

It's one thing to find that a piece of art doesn't stir you. It's quite another to determine that no one should ever have a chance to be impacted by that same piece. The former means you need to keep looking. The latter is the impulse of the tyrant - the mark of an ugly soul.

The Track of Intellectual Intolerance

The violent hate of ANTIFA is something we saw coming. It's the logical conclusion of the track that began years ago when college campuses began to normalize shouting down opposing viewpoints. After some thought, I've come up with a basic framework for the progression. A more expert social scientist can fill in the details.

First, you learn it's better mock and deride than argue. Opposing views don't have to be understood if they're "crazy" or "stupid."

Then, you move on to shouting them down and shutting them up. If they're not worth learning about, they're not worth allowing to be expressed.

Next, control the physical space, disallow the views you deem evil, and shove out anyone who dares trespass with foreign knowledge. This is where the physical violence begins, albeit cloaked as defense.

Finally, hunt down anyone who refuses to remain silent. Make them be silent. Punch them in the face to shut them up. Kill them if they persist.

Once all the thought criminals are dead, you've won. Fascism achieved.

We are sadly at that last stage. it remains to be seen how far hate groups like ANTIFA will go as they seek to beat down any they dislike (all of whom, so far, have not been actual Nazis).

Pursuit of Happiness Maximization

Here's a theoretical construct I very loosely have in my head. It starts with functions to define happiness, creates a mechanism, and then tackles the fundamental issue of individual decision making vs. central planning. This has very likely been done before, but I find it interesting to work it out myself.

Define a lifetime happiness function. It's the average of the satisfaction resulting from every choice you make in your life span. Higher overall satisfaction, higher happiness.

Function: H(h) = sigma(h(i))/n, i=0..n

h(i) is the satisfaction from a given choice, i, and n is the total number of choices you make in your lifetime.

Pursuit of happiness means as a general goal is pretty standard, so maximizing this utility function is a very safe bet. Note that this is more general than profit maximization, since satisfaction with a choice doesn't necessarily entail material gain. This accounts for things like self-sacrifice.

That's the top level. For scale, h(i) varies from 0 to 42, where 42 is maximum happiness and 0 is total misery. A neutral mood is 21. (42, being the meaning of life, is clearly the best choice for number here.)

What determines the value of h(i)? Resolution of tension, which is defined here as the difference between the expected outcome, E, and the observed outcome, O (straight out of estimation theory). Assuming every choice is made with the intent of being satisfied with the outcome (assumption of rationality) at least nominally, you'd get:

0 = What was observed fell well short of what was expected
21 = What was observed matched expectations
42 = What was observed exceeded expectations

This works for tallying up someone's existing happiness based on the past. Most people strive for H=21, since we're smart enough to know that it won't be sunshine and lollipops everyday. We know that some choices will be 0, so we seek to maximize individual choices when possible to compensate and keep the average at 21 or higher as much as possible. So we have local maximization with a goal of influencing a moving average upwards.

What about predictions? If the goal is to make each choice so that it maximizes happiness, we need a way of predicting what will do so.

Choices, by their nature, are games of incomplete information. There will always be things the person making the choice does not know and which could, potentially, result in an h(i)=0 situation. The good news is that for every choice similar to ones made previously, the unknowns will tend to decrease (via experience). We also know that a person who strives for the best each time they play a game of incomplete information will trend toward the maximum value over time.

Let's take this construct and see how altering the decision structure influences it. Up to now, it's the person whose happiness is on the line making all choices that affect h(i). Let's turn that over to an external faction. Assume a 3rd party now controls the choices of another. We'll call the 3rd party's happiness G and their individual happiness measured by g(i). we'll refer to the person they make choices for as H with h(i) as the happiness result.

Note that G does not directly set the value of h(i) - what they do is make the choice and H's reaction determines h(i). The expectations, E, that determine the final happiness, h(i), are set by H, not G. G, however, controls its own g(i) expectation values.

Let's set G's goals simply: they want to make H happy. When when h(i) is 21 or higher, g(i) is 21 or higher. What happens? G will try to make choices that it predicts will result in a strong h(i) value. It will base this likely on communication with H about preferences and expectations. However, this process will be guaranteed inefficient: there will be latent variables G cannot anticipate that H could, since only H is completely aware of its own history and mind.

Still, over time, G will be able to approximate a good h(i) value, since it will learn H's preference through testing and become better capable at predicting. This will, however, take longer than H by itself. H only needs to deal with one set of unknowns - those of uncertainty involving the circumstances of the choice. G has to deal with those as well as unknowns about H's expectations.

Complicate things further: now G has to manage the choices of not one H, but 100 H's (H1...H100), all of them unique. G's happiness, g(i), is now based on the aggregate happiness of those G makes decisions for. Even assuming every H makes the same choices in the same order as the others (a simplification that does not hold in the real world), G now has to deal with not just the unknowns of the choice, but now 100 sets of unknown behavioral preference variables. Every single set has to be learned individually over time through testing, consuming more bandwidth.

Now increase this to a thousand H's. A million. More.

Economy of scale requires G to make approximations. Instead of trying to perfectly learn each H, it goes for averages. After all, its own g(i) is satisfied by the overall score. Hit a bell curve with an average at 21 and G is happy. Never mind that means 50% of the H's could very well end up with final happiness tallies of less than 21. Even if G is smart and mixes up who gets what payoffs so there isn't one subset that always gets less than 21, there will still be H's who get H<21 and some who are very near 0. This could, interestingly, lower G's own happiness to less than 21, as well.

Compare this to a model where every H makes their own calls. Without the extra layer of unknowns, each individual is able to trend toward 21 faster than with interference from G. This shorter time frame increases the likelihood of H=21 being the norm. At the very least, it should be sufficient (and there's hand waving here) to make it so the likelihood is greater than when G makes choices for H. This should also hold (more hand waving) when G only makes some choices for H.

Questions and additions for later:
1. What if G has more knowledge about choice outcomes than H? How much would they need to justify interference? And wouldn't communication be more ethical?
2. Ethical and moral constraints, such as disallowing harming or stealing from others to increase h(i).
3. Role of information sharing between H's and increasing the speed of optimizing h(i).
4. Could low levels of happiness within a subset indicate bad choice methods brought on by misinformation?
5. Tyranny. What happens when G's happiness is maximized for things other than H's well being.
6. Regrets. When h(i) is maximized locally in time, but drops in value outside of that time frame when satisfaction criteria changes with time.

There's obviously a lot more work needed to make this conclusive, but it's a start. A mathematical/game theory way to prove that central planning will always be more inefficient at making others satisfied with their lives than letting them make their own choices would be wonderful. I think this may already exist, but it's fun to create my own system.