I'll fuck you up.

So is this kind of thing actually common in the UK or is it just something all of you like to "report" on?

It's much, much too common. Especially in the fucking universities.

tune in bongs

So this ad has now been removed after a bunch of feminists caused a storm on twitter, and then some of them thought it'd be appropriate to deface it. One such comment was "stop encouraging women to starve themselves", despite the fact that the woman behind the image is a very active, very healthy individual it'd seem.

Once again we see the insecure projections of people who simply must insist that cultural standards about beauty are a result of "the patriarchy", and that women who look like this must be starving themselves, and that weight loss to feel good about yourself is something inappropriate. For fuck sake people, get over yourselves.

The Spectator

There have been many economic theories over the centuries, accompanied by controversies among different schools of economists. But one of the most politically prominent economic theories today is one that has never existed among economists – the ‘trickle down’ theory. Yet this non-existent theory has been attacked from the New York Times to a writer in India. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speechwriter Samuel Rosenman referred to:-

‘the philosophy that had prevailed in Washington since 1921, that the object of government was to provide prosperity for those who lived and worked at the top of the economic pyramid, in the belief that prosperity would trickle down to the bottom of the heap and benefit all.’

The same theme was repeated in the election campaign of 2008, when candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called ‘the economic philosophy’ which

‘says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity tickles down to everyone else.’

Whether in the United States or in India, and whether in the past or in the present, ‘trickle down’ has been a characterisation and rejection of what somebody else supposedly believed. Moreover, it has been considered unnecessary to cite any given person who had actually advocated any such thing.

The phrase ‘trickle down’ often comes up in discussions of tax policies.Tax revenues have in a number of instances gone up when tax rates have been reduced. But any proposal by economists or others to cut tax rates, including reducing the tax rates on higher incomes or on capital gains, can lead to accusations that those making such proposals must believe that benefits should be given to the wealthy in general or to business in particular, in order that these benefits will eventually ‘trickle down’ to the masses of ordinary people.

But no recognised economist of any school of thought has ever had any such theory or made any such proposal. It is a straw man. It cannot be found in even the most voluminous and learned histories of economic theories.

What is sought by those who advocate lower rates of taxation or other reductions of government’s role in the economy is not the transfer of existing wealth to higher income earners or businesses but the creation of additional wealth when businesses are less hampered by government controls or by increasing government appropriation of that additional wealth under steeply progressive taxation laws. Whatever the merits or demerits of this view, this is the argument that is made – and which is not confronted, but evaded, by talk of a non-existent ‘trickle down’ theory.

More fundamentally, economic processes work in the directly opposite way from that depicted by those who imagine that profits first benefit business owners and that benefits only belatedly trickle down to workers.

When an investment is made, whether to build a railroad or to open a new restaurant, the first money is spent hiring people to do the work. Without that, nothing happens. Even when one person decides to operate a store or hamburger stand without employees, that person must first pay somebody to deliver the goods that are being sold. Money goes out first to pay expenses and then comes back as profits later – it at all. The high rate of failure of new businesses makes painfully clear that there is nothing inevitable about the money coming back.

Even with successful and well-established businesses, years may elapse between the initial investment and the return of earnings. From the time when an oil company begins spending money to explore for petroleum to the time when the first gasoline resulting from that exploration comes out of a pump at a filling station, a decade may have passed. In the meantime, all sorts of employees have been paid – geologists, engineers, refinery workers, and truck drivers, for example. It is only afterwards that profits begin coming in. Only then are there any capital gains to tax. The real effect of a reduction in the capital gains tax is that it opens the prospect of greater future net profits and thereby provides incentives to make current investments that create current employment.

Nor is the oil industry unique. No one who begins publishing a newspaper expects to make a profit – or even break even – during the first year or two. [note: Sowell was writing at a time when newspapers were profitable] But reporters and other members of the newspaper staff expect to be paid every payday, even while the paper only shows red ink on the bottom line. Similarly, Amazon.com began operating in 1995 but its first profits did not appear until the last quarter of 2001, after the company had lost a total of $2.8 billion over the years. Even a phenomenally successful enterprise like the McDonald’s restaurant chain ran up millions of dollars in debts for years before it saw the first dollar of profit. Indeed, it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy more than once in its early years. But the people behind the counter selling hamburgers were paid regularly all that time.

In short, the sequence of payments is directly the opposite of what is assumed by those who talk about a ‘trickle down’ theory. The workers must be paid first and then the profits flow upward later – if at all.

I always score ridiculously highly on antisocial and narcissistic.

I'm not sure exactly what they are and how he reaches the conclusion that metaethical judgements can be reached objectively.

Ethical naturalism.

P1: Ethical sentences express propositions.
P2: Some such ethical sentences are true.
P3: These ethical sentences are made true by objective features of the world.
P4: These objective moral features can be reduced to non-moral features.
C: Morality is objective.

I don't particularly agree with Harris' philosophy, but I might check it out. I've been meaning to read End of Faith.

The Moral Landscape is a good book outlining his "science of morality".

Yes. Mutually assured destruction is a genuinely beautiful system.

Even if it weren't, I still wouldn't follow in the bastard footsteps of Nicola Sturgeon and her promises to gut the military if we don't remove Trident.

It's yet another disgusting 'trade deal' being sharted out of the USA. Hopefully it goes down the drain with the rest of it's countless cousins.

Most of the hype against TTIP is just trumped-up bullshit on the part of the media.

The media loves to reduce the ISDS functions down to "suing for lost future profits", but that really is a mischaracterisation. Even the case with Phillip Morris in Australia--usually held up as the poster-boy for everything that's wrong with ISDS--has some legitimacy. PM aren't suing the Australian government over "lost profits" due to plain cigarette packages, they're suing because the government expropriated their intellectual property without compensation.

And even if you're still against PM and their instance (I'm undecided, myself) most instances of ISDS are nowhere near as egregious or controversial. A large majority of successful cases are when governments disfavour foreign companies; like when Ethyl Corp sued the Canadian government for banning an additive that only they used. Ethyl Corp claimed the government had banned the additive on political, instead of scientific or public-interest grounds.

On the face of it, it looks like Ethyl Corp is acting against the public interest and is simply acting for the sake of its own wallet. However, Ethyl Corp ended up presenting the government's own documents from just a year prior which clearly stated that there was zero risk presented by the additive Ethyl Corp had been using, and the party trying to push through the legislation had close ties with Ethyl Corp's domestic competitors.

And, as with all ISDS cases, it was played out in the media as some fat-cat company suing the government over health and environmental legislation. Nonetheless, the formulators of TTIP have recognised some of the faults in the Phillip Morris case and the TTP and added this:

and should be without prejudice to the right of the EU and the Member States to adopt and enforce, in accordance with their respective competences, measures necessary to pursue legitimate public policy objectives such as social, environmental, security, stability of the financial system, public health and safety in a non-discriminatory manner

ISDS cases are never as one-sided as they're made out to be.

I guess I'm having difficulty distinguishing between what is meant by induction in epistemology, versus that of mathematical induction, which Gödel has demonstrated to show completeness and consistency (as in the proof works for all inputs of whatever function it's addressing).

Here:

Although its name may suggest otherwise, mathematical induction should not be misconstrued as a form of inductive reasoning (also see Problem of induction). Mathematical induction is an inference rule used in proofs. In mathematics, proofs including those using mathematical induction are examples of deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning is excluded from proofs.

Things like this aren't an issue for Popperians; many critical rationalists have come to identify mathematical operations like Bayesian inference as valuable ways of testing the mettle of propositions. (At least, objective Bayesianism is, not so much subjective Bayesianism. Although I must admit I don't quite understand the distinction).

I think piranha wanted to talk about the problem of induction, and this seems like a good transition point.

I consider myself a postpositivist/critical rationalist in the tradition of Karl Popper and, some would argue, David Hume. So I'm not entirely convinced that induction actually exists as an epistemic tool.

Just a quick copy-paste from Wikipedia:

Postpositivists believe that human knowledge is based not on unchallengeable, rock-solid foundations, but rather upon human conjectures. As human knowledge is thus unavoidably conjectural, the assertion of these conjectures is warranted, or more specifically, justified by a set of warrants, which can be modified or withdrawn in the light of further investigation. However, postpositivism is not a form of relativism, and generally retains the idea of objective truth.

Critical rationalists hold that scientific theories and any other claims to knowledge can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have empirical content) can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them. Thus claims to knowledge may be contrastingly and normatively evaluated. They are either falsifiable and thus empirical (in a very broad sense), or not falsifiable and thus non-empirical. Those claims to knowledge that are potentially falsifiable can then be admitted to the body of empirical science, and then further differentiated according to whether they are retained or are later actually falsified. If retained, further differentiation may be made on the basis of how much subjection to criticism they have received, how severe such criticism has been, and how probable the theory is, with the least[5] probable theory that still withstands attempts to falsify it being the one to be preferred. That it is the least[5] probable theory that is to be preferred is one of the contrasting differences between critical rationalism and classical views on science, such as positivism, who hold that one should instead accept the most probable theory. (The least probable theory is the one with the highest information content and most open to future falsification.) Critical Rationalism as a discourse positioned itself against what its proponents took to be epistemologically relativist philosophies, particularly post-modernist or sociological approaches to knowledge. Critical rationalism has it that knowledge is objective (in the sense of being embodied in various substrates and in the sense of not being reducible to what humans individually "know"), and also that truth is objective (exists independently of social mediation or individual perception, but is "really real").

Though many logical proofs are most readily accomplished by contradiction (not synthetic), they're also accomplished using induction

Induction, however, is imperfect. Always is, and always will be. IIRC, Kant uses the example of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as an example of such a proposition, and yet I think it's unfair to categorise this as a truly a priori proposition. It may well be applicable in all circumstances we ever find, but in line with Hume I think it's really more of an incredibly strong conjecture, warranted by significant empirical evidence.

Although, having actually read GEB, you probably have a better grasp on the idea.

I think Hume was kind of a insane with his radical empiricism

Hume gets way too much flak for this, in my opinion. He wasn't as radical as most people seem to think; he did, after all, also present scepticism and criticise the naive, inductivist empiricism we often still see.

If anything, I'd criticise Kant for going off the rails with his ideas about synthetic a priori propositions; I don't find it particularly persuasive in the slightest.

Synthetic propositions/matters of fact cannot be certain according to Hume.

They aren't and never will be, Hume was right on this.

As far as I'm aware, he never made an exception for first principles in his schema.

Which is where he was wrong. Whether it was a purposeful omission or he just didn't think of it, his own idea is pretty clearly a presupposition. Philosophy still hadn't figured this out by the 1940s apparently, because the Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists all maintained ideas of Verificationism while also maintaining Hume's Guillotine.

Which is where the contradiction lies. If you maintain Hume's Guillotine, then Hume's Fork fails dramatically. If you reject Hume's Guillotine, it's quite clear that there is a role for presuppositions in any schema you develop, even if Hume himself never recognised it. And, it seems to me, you must reject Hume's Guillotine. There is a clear role for "oughts" in questions of what "is"; science itself is fundamentally based on Karl Popper's idea of falsificationism, which as you probably know is just a modern re-iteration of certain ideas like fallibilism and empiricism.

You have to pre-suppose things in order to get off the ground; science only ever works when you assume certain values like fallibilism and empiricism and physicalism. The point of epistemology is to make sure your pre-suppositions are actually worth holding.

Hume got one thing right and one thing wrong here, and I think you're essentially looking at the wrong side of the coin.