I think we definitely need some additional rights listed to account for digital. GDPR seems like a good start to give people more ownership of their data, but in the US we still have basically no data rights or protection against searches of digital content that you don't physically host.
One interesting case of "locks" getting less secure is for bank bags. On one of the recent LockPickingLawyer videos he talks about how these bags are easy to cut through but that's not usually an issue because they're mainly designed to be tamper-evident. Using a real lock is more of a risk so many banks are switching to an adhesive seal instead of a zipper-lock.
It was pretty commonplace to lie to avoid the social persecution of having a baby outside of marriage. This was still fairly common even recently - a young girl would go to a nunnery and them come back with a child "they adopted". There is also no evidence of any miracles aside from games of telephone played over centuries.
We also have plenty of equally verified accounts of virgin births from other religions going back even further than Jesus. So if we're believing any claims of virgin birth followed by claims of miracles, then the Christian god must surely be lying by saying they're the only god
> Claims of divine intervention aside, virgin births may have a more human explanation – a tragic demonstration of the extreme measures women have been forced to take to save themselves and their reputations.
It seems like the angel tells her in Luke 1:31 that it's happening whether she wants it to or not
> "You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus"
It's nice that she accepts it afterwards, but that's definitely not how consent works, and it doesn't seem like she was given any other option
Edit: I saw your other comment saying "there's other evidence of god respecting free will and he probably would have been fine with it if she didn't want to". The bible is full of contradictions so there may be evidence of a respect for free will somewhere else, but this specific story seems to contradict that
There's a difference between prediction and commanding.
It's like when a father tells his daughter she'll get married and have three sweet little children. That doesn't mean it's immediately set in stone and she's forced to.
I can agree with that, but as far as we see in the text it is a command - she's never told she has another option and we as the readers aren't given any indication that she thinks there is. I get that there's a charitable interpretation here if you look for it but I'm trying to just go based on what it says in the book
Christianity teaches that God respects human free will. It's partly why so much evil is in the world. If Mary had refused (which she could have), he would have respected that decision and we might be living in year 1970 right now.
I think this is overlooking the main argument - having someone waste time by getting their own food/shelter isn't really any better than having them waste time doing a job to get money for food/shelter. We would likely be better off not wasting people's time and just giving them food/shelter so they are free to figure out how to best use that time
> having someone waste time by getting their own food/shelter isn't really any better than having them waste time doing a job to get money for food/shelter
The latter isn't waste on the whole - somebody is getting a service in return. Then there's a separate question of what the worker is getting (for work that is meaningful to them and for work that isn't); that's one of the topics of the original post.
No thanks. I am unwilling to provide free food and shelter to random people who are capable of working but choose not to. Their survival is not my concern.
I think you're sneaking in some assumptions here that people just develop these skills within themselves and have the same opportunity to do so as anyone else. If you start the clock with them already having those skills and other people not then it makes sense, but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills.
However you end up is a combination of genes and environment - neither of which you have any control over. I don't see why someone should have full rights over whatever their output is when they have no control over the input. If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise. The public could then decide they should get a larger share for some reason(we generally do this with tax policy), but I don't see how they could have any moral claim to it
Even though the world is deterministic it is beneficial (or even necessary) to treat people as though they are responsible for their own actions, both in good and bad. We send people to prison even if the chance of further crime is ~0. We get mad at people when they act like assholes. We don't just blame it on "society".
It's all about incentives. If people think they might get punished for a certain thing, they tend not to do it. If people think they might get rewarded for a certain thing, they tend to do it.
If we want to be the kind of society that creates people with useful skills, we have to incentivize people to attain those skills. Think of this as us controlling the environment that shapes people a certain way.
> If someone has a great idea that can double food production - they owe all the money and food to the society because they would not have had the idea or been able to implement it otherwise.
I don't see why this makes any more sense than "they owe it all to the singularity that started the Big Bang, because it wouldn't have happened otherwise". Or, for that matter, anything in between. Kids, this is your brain on bad counterfactual reasoning. Look for proximate causes: in other words, necessary and sufficient conditions.
I'd argue both statements do make the same amount of sense. The wording of "owe" doesn't make as much sense for the big bang but my overall argument was that people shouldn't feel ownership over a causal chain they happened into and haven't had any true impact on.
I don't think proximate causes are a good basis for societal decisions - for example many people blame poverty on bad decision making but that neglects previous generational disadvantages that could affect genetics (e.g. lead poisoning related to redlining) and it overlooks that people grow up in different environments. This seems like it's basically an excuse for people to not care about the bad effects of a system they're participating in by saying "don't worry this isn't your concern you can just blame those people".
I think a lot of this boils down to a free will argument. While that's still ultimately up in the air, if we're looking at necessary and sufficient conditions then it seems like there's more evidence that we don't have free will than that we do. I think the "necessary and sufficient" relationship for free will would be that free will exists if we could have made a different decision than one that we did, and we don't have any way to test for that.
In the absence of free will people are just a result of their starting point and environment afterwards, and thus don't have a reason to claim disproportionate ownership over the output of that larger system.
Don't want this to come off as combative - I'm super interested in debate on this! I'd love to be proven wrong but it seems like we don't have free will so I feel like it's generally a mistake to try to organize society as if we did. I wasn't really aiming for a counterfactual argument, but how was this a "bad" counterfactual? It was definitely hyperbolic but meant to show in an extreme that the principles would still hold true and that someone wouldn't be able to claim ownership over the output. I feel like we probably just disagree on the axiom of free will but feel free to correct me!
"but they ultimately owe all of that back to the society that gave them those skills."
They owe it to the retired, who are the ones who gave them their skills and passed on the capital legacy they maintained. And we have a process that handles that. It's called a "pension system".
The "owe it back to society" bit is already captured by the pension system. You don't get to spend it again.
I'm not trying to make it black-and-white, there's certainly some degree of personal choice weighing in here - but it's not the core issue and it's probably a distraction. When we realized cigarettes were bad it was partially about informing people, but the main thing was to change marketing laws so you could make sure that wasn't undoing all the good info.
If I give you two loan options with bad terms and you have to choose one, then that is a fiscal policy thing and your choice is ultimately pretty inconsequential. You may be slightly better off than the person who made the other choice but the bad policy is affecting both of you.
Ultimately it's both a policy and a personal choice thing, but as with most society-wide issues the personal choice aspect falls away pretty quickly and we need to get realistic and figure out what a solution is instead of just blaming individuals.
This is an institutional problem and they should be blamed though.
It doesn't really matter what students "prefer", if a bank doesn't do their due diligence and a student isn't able to repay their loan, then the bank should be losing that money as a bad investment. They won't give a $1M mortgage loan to buy a 50k lot, and likewise won't give it to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back. I do think there's value in people getting degrees that don't pay well - but then you shouldn't be getting a loan to do so.
> students would be paying whatever Harvard or Stanford asked
I don't think this is true - people simply can't go to a school they can't afford and people don't have infinite money. We gave the banks the freedom to tell children that they will indeed be able to pay back loans that they often cannot, so it's the bad actions of one organization(banks) enabling another(school). Ivy league schools may be like Veblen goods where increased prices also increase demand - but that can't be true for all schools and we've seen tuition increases across the board.
The solution that seems best to me is to first fix the bankruptcy issue - if someone can't pay back a loan that is a risk the bank is accepting by giving the loan, just like any other loan. I think that alone would probably have enough of a chilling effect that way less people would be able to attend colleges at first and they would be forced to lower tuition rates. That would correct the market going forward, but it doesn't really help people that already fell victim to this system. That seems like it could be remedied by either making interest rates 0 or capping total interest to some amount relative to the principal (e.g. the total amount can never grow to more than 110% of the principal).
Similar to healthcare, I don't think education shouldn't be profitable in the short term - it's a long term investment a society has to make in itself so you can't really track it as an individual investment in any one person. If someone else becomes a doctor I'm still benefitting from that so it makes sense that I'd pay into some of the cost to educate that person. Unfortunately in the US at least we seem to be totally unable to do anything without a short-term and concrete path to profit regardless of the amount of good it would do.
> won't give [a student loan] to someone that doesn't seem like they could pay it back
I wonder what groups of people might be harmed by such a policy, but I would bet it won’t be middle and upper class families who are willing to co-sign for loans.
Yeah I think the initial motivation behind setting it up this way was good - "let's try to get as many people into college as possible". I'm narrowly making an argument against loans that are not dischargeable by bankruptcy or death.
Changing that in isolation would almost definitely have an effect where low income families can't afford college. I see that as a gap the govt should be filling either through public colleges or directly funding people to go to school, probably both. The core issue I see here is we're letting private companies make bad investments without liability, into something that probably shouldn't be profit-driven to start with
I agree with you except for your thoughts regarding paying to educate doctors. Indeed we do benefit from people becoming doctors and they are well paid, have prestige, and are generally one of the most well respected professions. This should be plenty to incentivize one to pursue medicine. You will be paying them when you receive care, exchanging money for their service, directly via billing or indirectly via insurance.
Not an expert on the topic, but my understanding is that anarchy rejects governance in general - there wouldn't be any "elevated decision-making body". It's not as much "you can leave if you don't like it" as it's "if you're here then you can change things".
I'm not prepared to defend this but that's the view - if you have a system of governance it isn't anarchy so if the argument is "all systems of governance are at least partially involuntary" then that may be true but doesn't say anything related to anarchy
Maybe we're just getting philosophical about word meanings here but how can you have governance that isn't imposed/hierarchical/authoritative? If whoever is making the rules says you can't do something and someone wants to, then the governance is the process that stops them. If someone is prevented from doing something, that implies a hierarchy capable of preventing the action, and that capability would have to be imposed by an authority.
When I say "governance" I mean in the broadest sense possible: the ways in which interactions between people are organized. If there's a better term for this I will happily use it!
