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July 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

36:44

337 Productive Debates (Part 1)

Some invaluable lessons from Freedomain Radio Board debates...

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Time	Text
	Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
	It's Steph, 8.24 a.m.
	on the 19th of July, 2006.
	And I hope you're doing fantastically.
	I have a couple of updates, and then we will get on to the topic at hand.
	Update numero uno is that I have bought a virtual server I just sort of wanted to be clear about where things stood with GoDaddy so that everyone has a proper perspective on the historical wrangling.
	And this will, of course, be of special interest to you who are in future generations who may be listening to this.
	See, we used to have these things called computers that weren't in your bloodstream.
	Anyway, so...
	GoDaddy has, in the fine print, and I can't really blame them for that, but I wish it was slightly more up front, GoDaddy does have a slight clause which says that your databases are only allowed to grow to 200 megabytes.
	And the reason that I can think of for that, just so that you understand the business value behind it, The reason I'm guessing that they have that particular restriction is twofold.
	One is that they may have licenses that are obviously site-wide licenses, and those site-wide licenses are only going to allow the databases to grow to a certain size because whoever's providing those licenses, whether it's SQL or some other database vendor, is not going to want people to be running monster databases.
	But I think the more important reason that the database size is limited to 200 megs Is because the larger the database, the more the processing time is required to find data, right?
	I mean, it sort of makes sense, right?
	Once you get a couple of haystacks together, the needle takes a little sifting through in order to...
	Sorry, the haystacks take a little sifting through before the needle can be found, so that's probably the issue that they're facing, and it's one of the reasons why they limit database size.
	All perfectly reasonable, and it is in there in the fine print.
	I just... Nobody had told me about it, and I hadn't really noticed it.
	That's what had happened to us.
	Now, I'd also heard the community server databases are limited to 10 megs, and that seems like a fair amount to me, but as it turns out, our community server database at freedomainradio.com has grown to 400 megabytes, and I think it's about half and half data and indexes.
	And that's surprising to me.
	As a database designer, it seems like quite a lot of indexing, but, I mean, how could it be a lot faster to find the index and to find the data, given that the index and the data are roughly the same size?
	It seems a little odd to me, but I'm a little behind the times in terms of database technology, so we're just going to go with it.
	So, I talked to GoDaddy last night for quite some time and we settled on a hosting plan.
	Now, I do need Windows for those Linux freaks out there.
	I'd be more than happy to work with Linux if it looked and behaved exactly like Windows.
	But I do need Windows because Community Server is an ASP application and, of course, ASP will not work on non-Windows platform thanks to the egalitarianism of Chairman Bill.
	And so I have to go with Windows.
	They offer two Windows services.
	One has a 10 megabyte space.
	The other is a dedicated server, which is pretty expensive and offers 120 megabytes of space.
	So it's a bit of a leap to the second one.
	Now, we have stored at our website at the moment about three and a half gigabytes of podcasts.
	And somebody had also mentioned that they would prefer to get those on a DVD. And if you'd like one, just send some information to me and some reasonable form of payment.
	And I will be happy to send you one.
	And then if I get enough requests for that, I'll set it up as an automated process.
	So we got 3.5, 3.7 gigs worth of...
	Of podcasts, of course, that's over the last seven or eight months, and so I'm going to move a chunk of those to Christina's website, mississaugatherapy.com, and we're going to have some of the older podcasts be fed from there for the new listeners, which I think is fine. We've got 110 gigs of bandwidth there, and we're at about 300 gigs of bandwidth at Free Domain Radio, and so...
	I simply couldn't. I sort of, it was the bare minimum package of 10 gigs or the super maximum overkill package, which I don't think I'll need for another 10 to 12 months from the dedicated server.
	So I bought the virtual server and we have 500 gigs of bandwidth.
	We have 10 gigs of space, which I think it'll give, even with the growth in podcasts, assuming that I'm going to move some to Mississauga Therapy, even with the growth of podcasts, we're going to have about 10 times, we'll have a 10 times growth situation for The community server database, and we're also going to upgrade to the very latest in community server, which I think will be kind of cool because it will allow us to organize our threads a little bit more.
	So that's sort of the latest status there.
	Thank you for your donations.
	This is where they're going, ladies and gentlemen.
	They're going to buying a virtual dedicated server for freedomainradio.com.
	It will also provide faster bandwidth and, of course, a more dedicated processor.
	So overall, things should be a heck of a lot more snappy, but the one thing it doesn't provide, and a very kind listener by the name of William has agreed to help me install Community Server.
	I can hack my way through these things, but it's a trail of tears, sweat and blood.
	So they're going to give me the database in some sort of backup format, and then I'll restore it.
	Within the SQL environment, within my virtual server, and then we will go to town with a new community server.
	So it's going to be down probably for a day or so.
	Sorry about that, but it'll be tanned, refreshed, relaxed, and ready to roll when we get it back up.
	So that's what's going on with the site at the moment, and that will avoid us from having to continually have these outages.
	And just for the sake of your understanding, through a variety of mechanisms, we have discovered that in the database which holds our own community server data, there are over 600 other boards.
	So I think that we're going to get slightly snappier responses.
	I think the response hasn't been bad, but GoDaddy in allowing us either to break the 10-meg I mean, a really proactive hosting group, which I would have to be paying a little bit more than the basic rate for.
	I understand that. You only make hosting...
	You only make money from hosting if you don't have to talk to anyone.
	As soon as you have to talk to someone and as soon as you have to do anything technical, you blow your profit for years, right?
	I mean, it's like a failure on a loan in a bank.
	So I understand the economics of it.
	I just wish that they had some slightly more automated tools to send you an email to say, listen, dude, by the way, your community server database is projected to run out of space in two months.
	Here's our suggestions, blah, blah, blah.
	It has happened rarely enough for them that writing those scripts is not economically productive.
	Writing and maintaining and upgrading and documenting and training and blah blah blah on those scripts is not too productive.
	So what happens is they wait for complaints, grudgingly increase the database size, and suggest that you upsize your account.
	And I'm not saying that's the best business practice in the world, but I can certainly understand the economic drivers based on the rarity of the situation.
	So they have everything else in the world to deal with, legitimate bugs that affect a lot of people versus, you know, the one in 10,000 whose community server board overflows their account.
	Because I have 50 gigs of disk space on my account, so a 400 meg limit seems a little arbitrary, but I can sort of understand it a little bit more now in that they'd have to dedicate more CPU time if they let the databases grow larger, and Lord knows what that means in terms of licensing.
	Alrighty, enough about that.
	Let's move on to some interesting comments that were made by a prolific poster who has very, very great things to say.
	And he was talking about some levels of frustration that have occurred on the Free Domain radio board.
	And I think they've been relatively polite.
	And I've certainly experienced them themselves, though not particularly with determinism this time.
	But there has been some frustration on the boards in terms of debating.
	And, again, the tone has been pretty polite overall, and I understand that.
	And I think that that level of frustration is absolutely essential.
	I think it's absolutely essential.
	To pursue these debates until you recognize a level of frustration, and then it's important to understand why you feel that frustration so that you can avoid getting into those kinds of situations again, right?
	We obviously don't want to debate people who don't meet a certain number of criteria, just as they shouldn't debate us or shouldn't want to debate us if we don't meet their criteria.
	So I thought I'd mention a few that I've sort of learned about in a property rights debate that's been going on recently.
	Basically, the property rights debate has been property rights are fiction.
	They don't exist in reality.
	You don't have any real relationship to something that you claim to own.
	It doesn't create a subatomic lasso that you can measure using some sort of device.
	It doesn't create an electromagnetic...
	Tractor beam field around the thing that you own, so people were saying property rights don't exist, and the argument was sort of saying that that, which I've sort of been alluding to, sorry to use the word sort of so much, I'll sort of try and quit.
	But I was alluding to a new theory of property rights that I was working on to help explain how the creation of a usable good results in ownership or control of it because it wouldn't exist otherwise.
	But that didn't satisfy the people who were on the other side of the table as far as property rights go.
	And so basically the idea was put forward, the property rights don't exist.
	And so somebody put forward the proposition or the counter-proposition to say, well, if you don't believe that property rights exist, and therefore you should not use violence to protect them.
	And this was all the way down to the body as well.
	So the property of the body does not exist, or you don't own your own body, and so on.
	I think we're good to go.
	I'm just looking for consistency.
	I myself could never stomach putting forward a moral proposition that said that a woman who's being attacked and raped, or a man for that matter, could not defend himself.
	I could also not put forward a moral proposition that said a child that is being beaten has no right to run away or defend himself.
	That it's immoral. I just couldn't put that forward because that, to me, would be morally repugnant.
	And that doesn't mean that it's wrong.
	Maybe I'm completely incorrect in my moral instincts and what I can stomach from an ethical standpoint is completely wrong.
	I'm totally open to that.
	I'm just saying that I, in good conscience, could not put forward a moral proposition that said defending yourself against the rapist is immoral.
	It would just feel so wrong.
	I mean, I know that that's not a proof, but...
	That's how I organize my working from first principles, and that's how I kind of sniff that I've gone awry in some manner.
	And this is the same thing I have with determinism, which some people say is mistakenly approached as if it were fatalism, as if the two were different.
	But I just can't stomach the consequences of certain moral propositions.
	And so I work very hard to try to...
	To try to deal with moral propositions so that I end up with a framework that makes sense logically and also deals with some of the basics like don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, don't beat children, don't steal property, like all of the basic moral stuff.
	Because if you end up with a moral theory that says...
	You can't ever change anyone else's mind because everything is determined.
	You can't take any action to prevent your fate or any action that you do take is purely illusory.
	And also, you can't defend anybody who wants to come and take your property.
	I just think that's...
	Not particularly accurate.
	Like, the logical consequences of your body is not your property is if somebody wants to have sex with your wife and propositions her and starts taking his clothes off, she can't resist.
	Even if it's not sort of out-and-out rape, right?
	But if it's simply just somebody wants to swap with you, then it's not her property.
	Her body's not her property, and so on.
	And if the body is the property, then property rights do exist, and therefore it can be reasoned that the products of the body exist differently.
	And are valid. And the effects of the body are valid, which is where we get morality to begin with, right?
	If I own my body, I own the effects of my body, which means if I punch someone, I'm responsible.
	And so because the effects of my body in the world...
	Are owned by me, so to speak, than I own the good and the bad of what I produce, right?
	So if I create something, I own it.
	And if I punch someone, I own that action.
	I'm morally responsible for it.
	And that all seems to make sense to me and seems to work and also seems to be valid in a productive sense within what we see in the world, right?
	The more the property rights are respected, the better a society does.
	And so, I mean, I don't want to sort of go over the whole debate for that, but...
	I think that the establishment of property rights is a great challenge and it's something that we need because when we see societies without property rights they tend to be very violent and brutal and murderous and economically destructive and so on.
	So I think that property rights are very important to work with.
	I think that being able to give women the permission to Use a taser or a sort of pepper spray or a gun if they have to on someone who's attacking them, I think is perfectly valid.
	I think that saying you have the right to self-defense is valid and so on.
	And you can't get any of that without property rights.
	So when I ask people, okay, so defending yourself against rape is wrong, I don't mean that that means that their theories are completely incorrect.
	I just want to know what their level of consistency is.
	Because if they can't stomach the consequences of their own moral propositions, Then I don't need to disprove them.
	That's the important thing. It saves you a heck of a lot of time.
	Like, to give you an example, Nietzsche and his master and slave morality is perfectly consistent with his premises.
	So he believes that there's no such thing as external truth.
	There's no such thing as universal, objective validation of ideas.
	So there's no such thing as truth.
	Now, if there's no such thing as truth, there can't be any such thing as ethics, right?
	Because ethics are universally preferred behavior, propositions that result in that.
	A general idea.
	And so if there's no such thing as truth, there's certainly no such thing as ethics.
	There's certainly no such thing as morality.
	And so Nietzsche is perfectly consistent with that because he then has a great challenge to explain, which everybody who is a nihilist does have a challenge, or a radical skeptic does have a challenge to explain.
	If there is no such thing as truth and morality, then why does every human being in the world talk about truth and morality pretty much all the time whenever they're explaining themselves or their actions?
	It's just a challenge you have to accept.
	Like, if you say that in biology, or if you say that in physics there's no such thing as universal laws, then you sort of have to explain why behavior follows universal laws seemingly perfectly, right?
	I mean, it's just a challenge you have to explain.
	If you say there's no such thing as truth, and you don't mind the fact that you're establishing a truth proposition saying there's no such thing as universal truth, if you don't mind all of that illogic, then you do have the challenge of explaining why everybody believes in morality and truth.
	So, the way that Nietzsche solves that, which is consistent with his principles, he says that there is no such thing as truth, but the reason that everyone believes that there is such a thing as truth and morality is because it is a tool used for the transfer of property.
	So, the rich will teach the poor to love poverty so they can keep exploiting them.
	The poor will teach the rich to love charity so that they will keep giving to them.
	Parents will teach their children to obey their parents as a universal moral rule so that they have to expend fewer efforts, fewer resources in controlling them.
	Basically, there's this huge game of pinball around truth and ethics and morality.
	Which explains why everybody talks about it, because it's a way of controlling other people.
	So since truth doesn't exist, but everybody's talking about it, since ethics don't exist, but everybody uses them, how do you explain that?
	Well, Nietzsche says, master-slave morality.
	It's about the transfer of resources.
	And Marx also has the same sort of approach.
	So that's a consistent response.
	And that's one of the reasons why Nietzsche is a popular philosopher, because you don't find him quailing back from the consequences of his own positions.
	In the same way that Plato, who believes that this super-neuomenal realm, this higher realm, this realm of pure abstractions, is superior to the physical realm of sensual evidence, Well, he perfectly consistently says that the truth is something which cannot be communicated in a rational or objective manner.
	The truth is essential to life, and therefore, in order to organize society, we need the philosopher kings who have complete control over everyone and can create pleasant fictions to get them to follow the truth as best as they're able.
	Given the fact that they haven't achieved enlightenment, the best you can do is lie to them and have them act as if they have achieved enlightenment and all that.
	So, Plato, again, does not shrink from the consequences of his own propositions.
	He's pretty well consistent all the way through, which is why he goes from this higher realm of pure ideals to a bloody dictatorship as the ideal political form, right?
	He is the first totalitarian, and that is very consistent with his premises, right?
	So what I want to know when people put forward propositions is, okay, well, this is what you say.
	Do you accept these consequences?
	And if the person says, yes...
	I accept these consequences.
	Then the next question that I would have, and I have not met anybody yet, who, when they have premises that result in things like, there's no such thing as choice, so there's no point in arguing, or if there's no such thing as property, give me your wallet...
	I'm going to take your wallet.
	I'd love to be sitting across the table from this guy.
	Because then I would say, give me your wallet.
	And if he then hands over his wallet, because he's not supposed to use force to defend it, then that's great.
	I'll go spend all his money, and he's not going to have any problems with it, right?
	I mean, I don't think, the funny thing is, I don't think that the person who, the people who are arguing against property rights have even donated to Freedom Aid Radio.
	I just think that's kind of funny, right?
	I've actually asked for 50 cents a podcast, and these people have listened to a lot of podcasts and haven't donated, but then say you can't defend your property, and if somebody asks you for it, you have to give it up.
	I just think that's kind of funny, right?
	I mean, I would never take anyone seriously who didn't follow their own philosophy in real life.
	And so if somebody says, yes, I accept these consequences, here's my wallet, here's my shirt, and so on, Then I would at least have respect for their consistency.
	And then I would ask them, did you come up with these ideas And then accept these consequences, or did you look at the world, try to figure out what works, and abstract from it?
	Because I generally think that working empirically is superior to working from pure theory alone.
	I think you should work deductively, not inductively.
	And that's the scientific method.
	You observe what is, and then you try to abstract the principles.
	And then you see if they apply to other situations of which you know less.
	You want to use principles extracted from real-world observations To be able to expand your knowledge of things which you have not had direct experience of yet.
	I mean, that's generally the scientific method, right?
	Now, if somebody says, no, I believe this is a principle and I'm following that through to its conclusion and I did not derive these principles by looking at what works and what doesn't work, then I would have a certain amount of skepticism.
	It doesn't mean that they're incorrect.
	It just means that they're much less likely to be correct because they're not working empirically.
	Whereas if somebody says, no, I observed that when societies do not value property rights, they tend to flourish and everyone's happy, so I abstracted that principle and now I'm applying it to other things.
	Then I would have much more respect for that, because they're starting empirically extracting the principles and then applying them to other things.
	If you start with some sort of premise and then just apply it consistently to everything...
	And don't like the consequences, then you're wrong.
	I mean, fundamentally, you're incorrect, right?
	So my particular philosophical approach has been to say, well, societies that value property rights do better, so there must be something good about property rights.
	People in a state of freedom tend to gravitate towards property rights rather than no property, right?
	So in capitalism or in a free market society, there aren't very many communes, whereas in Israel or in the Soviet republics, the USSR, the bad old days, there were collectivized farms and kibbutzes and so on.
	But those tend to be subsidized by the taxpayers at the point of the gun.
	And in a state of freedom, when people have lots of options, they don't tend to start armies, as you noticed in most of the 19th century in America.
	And you don't see armies spontaneously forming in places like Sweden and Switzerland and so on.
	So in a state of freedom, people don't sort of spontaneously organize armies and go to war.
	And when states are smaller, people do better.
	When the welfare state is smaller, economic growth is higher.
	When government controls currency, as it has for the last century in the United States, the currency loses 97% of its value.
	And this causes enormous heartache and problems for people.
	I mean, you could go on and on, right?
	But the basic idea is that you start from empirical observation and try and extract the principles.
	And that can then help you to figure out what's going to happen in the future and can help you figure out and understand things which you haven't experienced yet.
	It's all perfectly common-sensical and perfectly scientifically method-y.
	So, if somebody has just grabbed a bunch of principles and is now applying them, even if they apply them perfectly consistently, I would generally say, well, have you...
	Have you really worked from observation or have you worked purely from theorizing in a room, like in the Descartesian sense?
	And theorizing in a room is much more risky.
	It's much, much more risky.
	It's like trying to come up with theories about gravity when you're sort of floating as a single brain in a tank of salient solution and you have no conception of gravity and you're trying to work out physical rules.
	You're like a brain in a tank trying to figure out physics with no access to empirical evidence or sensual evidence.
	Sorry, empirical evidence or testable hypotheses and reproducible experiments and so on.
	It's certainly possible that as a brain in a tank you could come up with correct physical theories, but it's not going to be very likely.
	The odds against it are astronomical, right?
	Extraordinarily high. So those are the questions that I ask, and I don't ask these questions just to be difficult.
	I just want to know, where are you reasoning from?
	Have you observed the world and understood history and sort of learned deeply the nature of things as they are, extracted principles and applied those and checked those and so on?
	Or have you just come up with an idea which you're now applying willingly to everything, like property rights are an illusion, right?
	So, where this all broke down was sort of a two-fold thing, and we'll talk a little bit more this afternoon about principles by which you can determine whether this is going to work out for you as a debater or as somebody who wants to gain knowledge or not.
	So, the first thing is that somebody asked the property rights attackers, or those who didn't believe in property rights, said, well, okay, so you don't believe that property rights exist, or you don't believe that property rights are valid.
	Can you come up with an alternate model to what Steph is proposing of property rights or of the distribution or the use of goods within reality?
	Sort of important, right?
	Because there's nothing wrong with being nihilistic and breaking down things, but at some point, if you are wise enough to see that what exists is false, then you obviously have a criteria for true and false.
	I mean, you have to, logically. If you're going to say to somebody else, your argument is false, then you have to have a criteria for truth and falsehood.
	Which means that you have to have some idea of what is true as well.
	I mean, you can be a nihilist and just break people's ideas down, but that seems rather uncharitable, I guess, right?
	If you have figured out the difference between truth and falsehood, it would seem to me to be rather kind to not just point out what people are doing wrong, but help them in the direction of what is correct as well, because you have the knowledge of falsehood, which means you have the knowledge of truth, and so on, right?
	That's a perfectly valid argument.
	A perfectly valid request to make to somebody who's attacking your argument is, what is the alternative?
	And if they don't know the alternative, then that's a good example of somebody who's just working from a first principle without any empirical observation, who doesn't actually have a criteria of truth.
	They just oppose certainty as a whole.
	They're just a kind of nihilist.
	They oppose certainty. Certainty is the principle which they don't like.
	So they bring up all of these arguments against certainty, but without having any certainty of their own.
	So this person said, well, what is your alternate model for the distribution and use of goods within reality if you don't like what Steph's proposing?
	And the gentleman then replied something to the effect of, well, it's exactly what Steph is proposing, but with the knowledge that it's all an illusion.
	Which is exactly the same thing that you get back from determinists in the long run.
	Pardon me for simplifying the determinist position, but when you say to a determinist, these are the consequences, blah, blah, blah, then there's no crime, no punishment, no discipline for children, no ethics, no morality, no pride, no self-esteem, no love, no preference, no whatever, right?
	Then they say, no, no, no, you have to, I mean, you kind of have to act as if you have free will, but you don't, right?
	So then the question is, well, how is it different?
	Well, it's exactly the same as those who believe in free will, but the difference is that you know that you don't, right?
	So you have to act exactly the same with the knowledge that it's an illusion, right?
	And that's, to me, well, we'll get to that in a sec, but it's the same thing that came back from this gentleman about property rights.
	Yes, Steph's model of property rights is perfectly valid, and it's exactly the same if you take my position.
	It's just that you know that it's not true, but you still have to act in this manner, although that you know it's not true.
	It's the same thing as free will, and of course that is intrinsically annoying.
	It's very annoying.
	Because... That if you end up in this situation where you go through all of this intellectual sweat, labor, wrangling, back and forth, discussion, debate, examples, and so on, you expend a fair amount of your life, energy, and time, and what is the end result?
	Well, it's exactly the same.
	Your behavior doesn't change at all.
	All that's happened is you now fostered a species of hypocrisy that you are forced to live with.
	So if you don't believe in property rights, but it turns out that you have to recognize property rights as a necessary illusion, then all that's happened is that you have to act exactly the same, but now you know that you're hypocritical and you have no chance of escaping that hypocrisy.
	Well, thank you for that excellent gift!
	So that, to me, is sort of rather pointless.
	I mean, we'll get into more of this this afternoon, but I just sort of wanted to point out where the debates are, and I think that they're enormously valuable, as long as we extract the understanding of what makes a productive debate and what makes a non-productive debate.
	A non-productive debate is where you go through the whole wrangling, and then if someone says, well, you have to believe exactly what, like your opponent then says, well, yes, you have to act exactly as if the beliefs that you're putting forward are true, but they're not true.
	And you have to know that they're not true.
	Why? Well, because you have to know.
	But how is it going to change your behavior?
	Well, it doesn't, right? So this is somebody who's theorizing in a vacuum, right?
	Who thinks that ideas exist in some abstract plane, that it's important to have fidelity to ideas regardless of how you act.
	Whereas I would say that the only measurable consequence of ideas is action.
	So... Otherwise, it's really just a placebo.
	It's a placebo, right? So anyway, we'll sort of talk about that a little bit more this afternoon.
	So that's sort of the first thing that came out of it.
	And this guy said, and so somebody said, well, what's the point of all of that?
	And he says, well, I just want to differentiate between what is real and what is not real.
	And property rights are not real. And so I said, okay, first of all, that's rather pointless, the debate wherein, at the end of it, everything is exactly the same as it was at the beginning, but now you know that you're false, but you still have to act as if it were true, but you know that it's false, and blah, blah, blah.
	Well, that's just silly, right?
	Well, what's the point of all of that, right?
	Why not just leave people with the pleasant delusion that property rights exist, since they're going to have to act the same either way?
	They're going to act more consistently if they just believe property rights exist, right?
	This is just easier. So...
	That's sort of the one side of things.
	Now, the second side of things is I then ask, well, you're obviously a gentleman who knows the difference between real and non-real, right?
	Since you're very interested in focusing on what is real, then you must have this great ability, and I envy that ability because I find it very hard, to differentiate between what is real and what is not real.
	And this is a very important thing to understand.
	Like if somebody comes at you, guns blazing, or even in a more gentle manner, comes at you and says, your argument is false, and they bring all these proofs and so on, fantastic.
	So you have an objective criteria for true and false, right?
	It's not just your opinion that my argument is false.
	It's true.
	It's true that my argument is false.
	It's a fact that my argument is false, and it's a fact that's independent of our opinions.
	Because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense to argue about something that was just opinion, right?
	It's like arguing whether blue or red is a better colour.
	It's a big waste of time, right?
	And so when somebody says, well, your argument is false, and I'm telling you that your argument is false, and I'm saying that you should disbelieve in your argument because what's real is better than what's real, what's true is better than what's false, then what I did was I asked this gentleman, I said, okay, great.
	So you must have an excellent criteria for determining the difference between true and false, real and non-real.
	Perhaps you could share that with us so that we can understand where you're coming from.
	And, amazingly enough, well actually not that amazingly enough, he just flat out refused.
	He refused to share it with me.
	He said, I could tell you, but it's a very dangerous thing to tell you, so I'm not going to.
	I mean, come on, does he think I was born yesterday?
	I know a bullshit bluff when I hear it, or see it, or read it.
	I mean, come on.
	I'm just too funny. So this guy spent pages upon pages upon pages telling everyone that they're wrong and that what they advocate is not real, which means that he is obviously an expert on what is real.
	And I'm not trying to provoke you here if you're listening to this.
	I'm just sort of pointing out that from the other side of the fence, it does look rather silly.
	So he obviously has a great idea about what is real and what is not real because he's telling everyone that this obvious thing that people believe in, like property rights and the sanctity of the body, Is not real, right?
	So this guy has a real non-intuitive insight into what is real and not real, which he then refuses to share.
	So what you believe is not real, but I'm not going to share with you my methodology for determining what is real or not real.
	And that's just obviously a bluff, right?
	This guy doesn't have a methodology for determining what's real or not real.
	He just likes attacking people who put forward propositions.
	And again, even that is not the end of the world, but let's just be honest with each other.
	I mean, let's just be honest.
	There's nothing wrong with putting your ideas in the path of this kind of nihilistic virulence.
	I think it can be very healthy.
	I learned an enormous amount from reading just about everything that Nietzsche ever wrote.
	Because you put yourself in front of Nietzsche's cynical flamethrower and what comes out usually is a lot more robust than what goes in, and that's fine.
	But... This person should not start talking about what is real and what is not real, but just say, no, I'm the critique, right?
	I'm the criticizer.
	I just like to attack ideas and I think that that's a very healthy place.
	I don't have anything better to offer and I don't know what's true or false, but I sure do like pulling down other people's ideas.
	And there's nothing wrong with that. That can be a perfectly healthy thing to do, right?
	As you rise in business into senior management, that's your job, is to pinpoint the problems and to be, you know, Joe negative about everything that's going on, right?
	So somebody's proposing a product line, then you are a new product, then you want to make sure that you ask them all the questions that could conceivably derail the purchasing of that product in the market so that you don't waste all this money pursuing something that doesn't pan out, right?
	That's perfectly valid.
	But it's just important to be honest, right?
	And this is what I just liked about this particular interchange.
	But what I think is hugely valuable about it, and very important for us to understand, is that we look at these debates and we get frustrated, and I understand that.
	And I'm sort of learning this.
	It's been a while since I've been in the debating world, so I'm sort of learning this stuff, some of it over again and some of it for the first time.
	It is important that we go through that experience, experience that frustration, you know, honor that feeling within ourselves.
	And then try and figure out the principles by which we can avoid these kinds of problems in the future.
	And so what I'm going to do, and I'll sort of see if I get a chance to work on it at lunch today, what I'm going to do is try and figure out a good and simple and easy sort of checklist for debating so that we don't end up with these kinds of problems.
	It's been very instructive for me to go through these, and I've learned an enormous amount by reasoning with people and following my instincts.
	But I think that it's worth now, having gone through this for a couple of months on the board, to extract the principles that are the most valuable in terms of what I've learned from the debates.
	Again, you work from empiricism and extract the general principles and see if they apply elsewhere, which I'll then post on the board.
	And the board was down this morning, and it could be because they're transferring everything I've got to my new virtual server.
	So maybe you won't even get this until it's all done.
	Isn't that funny? I'm warning you it's going to go down.
	It might already be down.
	We shall see. But I think that it's going to be a helpful document and something to refer people to and something which hopefully I can keep short enough to fill out.
	So that people don't end up in these frustrating debates.
	Or if they do, they at least know in advance that it's going to be this kind of thing and they can use it as a sort of object lesson for other people and this, that, and the other.
	So thank you so much for listening.
	I hope that this has been helpful.
	I thank you, as always, for your kindness and generosity in both listening to this and a little bit less kindness and generosity lately as far as donations go.
	But if you could see your way clear to sending me some money...
	Not so much those who've already sent me, and I appreciate that, but I think it's time for the people who are lurking to step up and throw a few bucks my way, because I think that what we're doing here is very valuable.
	It's time-consuming, it's expensive, and I think that if we believe that volunteerism is the way to go, I would say, put your money where your values are, and your values will increase, and you will be happier thereby.
	So send me some cash, fill out a listener survey, sign up for FeedBurner, all the good stuff at freedomainradio.com, and I hope that this site is up.

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