All Episodes
Previous Next
March 11, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:20
1608 Empiricism, Humility and the Free Market

Why it is so tough to be humble and rational if you have never lived in the free market.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, it's Steph. If you're doing well, March the 4th, on my way to the gym.
And, you know, for some reason, I've been thinking about...
Well, I shouldn't say for some reason.
I think I know what the reason is. I've been thinking about my entrepreneurial experience and why it is that my revolution in thinking came after, gosh, I don't know, almost a decade as a software entrepreneur.
And I think I've come up with something useful, at least I hope it's useful, and perhaps you can let me know what you think.
Why is it that I really only learned humility after many years in the software field?
Well, in the software field, and I think this is true of most entrepreneurial activities, I mean, particularly those in a really free market environment like software.
I mean, software is the most free market environment that really can be imagined.
And I was thinking, why is it that I really only discovered humility and the subjection of my thoughts to evidence, reason and evidence, after so long in the software field?
And it gave me the idea, or I've been thinking about this as an idea, that the free market is sort of a diuretic for bullshit, if that makes any sense.
What I mean by that is that when you work in the free market, in the really free market, or at least as free market as you can get, humility is foundational to your success.
The customer is always right.
And it's one reason why this show has been so successful is that I can't and won't impose my will on what this conversation should be about with y'all.
I mean, I can't and I won't do it.
If you want to talk about dream analysis, then we'll talk about dream analysis.
If you want to talk about personal issues, we'll talk about personal issues.
If you want to talk about epistemology, we'll talk about epistemology.
But I can't and won't impose...
The conversation on you.
I mean, there's obviously a little bit of a dance because I have to sort of bring up topics that are new in the hopes of sparking people's interest, but I listen.
And the number of false starts have been enormous.
I just think of the boot camp and the Entrepreneurs' Roundtable and other kinds of roundtables and so on.
The amount of false starts or things which I've tried out, which haven't been to anyone's particular long-term interest, that...
It's really, really important.
I mean, there's things that I would love to pursue further, but we all aren't that interested in it, so that's what I will respond to.
And that is the humility of voluntarism.
And I think it's really important when people don't experience that in school, which obviously they don't, and if they don't experience that in church, which obviously they don't, they experience the opposite in those two environments of voluntarism.
And if they don't experience it in the family, where the hell are they going to learn this from?
Well, they're not going to learn it in academics, right?
Because in academics, your customers are not fundamentally your students, right?
It's getting published, it's getting tenure, it's your department, it's the sources of your government grants and fundings and so on.
So, fundamentally...
Your customers are not your students, but all these other people, right?
But in the free market, like in the free software market that I was in for many, many years, it was all about the customer.
And if the customer just wasn't interested in something, you had to change.
You had to change. Sometimes you would have to throw out almost everything and start all over again.
I mean, the number of times that I sort of, quote, revolutionized the code base for the sake of customer requirements was significant.
16-bit to 32-bit.
We went from access to SQL Server to Oracle.
We went from an access front-end to a VB front-end, and then we went to ASP to the web.
We just revolutionized everything all the time.
And one of the fundamental things that occurs in an entrepreneurial environment is there's sort of a proof of concept that occurs where you find out if a product is at all interesting to the market.
And then there's a round two where you basically scrap everything and write it again professionally once you have investment and so on.
And you just turf it all and start all over again.
When clients wanted to make adjustments to the data sets, well, we gave them the tools to do it themselves.
So rather than charge money and try and sell that as a service, we wanted to really focus on the license fee and not on the hourly rates for customizations.
So we gave them the tools to make adjustments to whatever they wanted themselves.
And so that, I think, is really, really important.
It's really important. If you go through that, the customer is always right.
You can't impose what you think is preferential.
You can't impose what you think is important on your customer.
That it is a pull and not a push market.
I mean, there's a push in terms of what's available, but it's a pull in terms of what's valuable.
I think that experience...
Really ground out any last traces of arrogance or entitlement or all of those things that come from simply not having experienced equality negotiations as a child and as a young man.
If you haven't gone through that, there's two things that I look for when I look for somebody who's wise, somebody who I really, really am going to respect and learn from, about life as a whole, about philosophy as a whole, not about particular, specific things.
The first is I ask myself, have they ever really worked in the free market or as free a market as they could have?
If they're talking about the free market, have they ever really worked in the free market?
And I don't necessarily mean as an entrepreneur.
I mean, it can be as an employee, you're working in the free market.
If you work for a company that's on the cutting edge of the free market like software, I don't mean as a military, industrial or government or even a large bank or whatever, but a real free market facing organization.
Even as an employee, have you worked in the free market?
And if you have worked, and the more senior, the better, right?
I mean, in my opinion, if you've been an entrepreneur and founded a company, so much the better.
Because there's certain things that you just have to experience in order to learn.
And the humility and the constant fundamental reinvention of the free market is something that...
So, when you see all these...
I mean, this is true even in the freedom movement.
You see all of these thinkers about the free market.
And my first question is, well, have you ever actually worked in the free market?
And if you're an academic, and if you're a politico, and if, you know, then you're really not working in the free market.
And I don't count selling to, you know, selling newsletters to Christians to be working in the free market.
That's a pretty artificial market, in my opinion.
Anyway, so... That's the first question I ask.
And the second question I ask is, to what degree is this person devoted to self-knowledge?
And that has to be something that's kind of measurable.
And I generally look for therapy, right?
I mean, I generally look for somebody who's gone through some therapy to find out about self-knowledge.
Because self-knowledge is a very, very tough pursuit.
It's a very tough pursuit.
It's very challenging. And while it may be the case that somebody can become an expert in self-knowledge and introspection without therapy, It's not something that, you know, generally you would look for as a starting point.
Like, in the same way, it is possible, I guess, that someone could have taught themselves dentistry, but it's still nice to see a couple of plaques on the wall, right, just for safety and security's sake.
And it's the same thing with self-knowledge.
I guess it's possible somebody could have read tons of books and journaled and, you know, figured things out for themselves.
But if they haven't gone to therapy, then they're really taking the long, hard road, which tells me something about their dedication to self-knowledge.
So, have you worked in the free market and have you been an entrepreneur, ideally, in the free market and have you gone through therapy?
Now, of course, I'm aware that I'm sort of describing myself, but that did kind of work for me.
And I think there's very, very good reasons why it worked for me.
But I think people have a tough time being humble.
And specifically, the free market teaches you all about the reinvention of fundamentals.
Empiricism is really impossible to learn without being in the free market, in my opinion.
You don't really get how important empiricism really is unless you've been in the free market and dealt with really voluntary customers.
My criticisms of the Ron Paul campaign and other political movements within libertarianism It's been pretty much the same through the whole period, which is where's the empirical facts?
You make all these claims, where are the empirical facts?
And this is just a training that was ground into me.
When you go for financing, when you go for investment, you can't make claims without evidence.
I mean, you can, but they'll just laugh you out of the room and you'll never get another meeting with anybody that they know.
So if you're going to go for funding and you make claims that you don't have any empirical evidence for, people will just assume you're kind of a bullshit artist, and they will assume that it's not true because you have avoided making the empirical research and getting the objective facts.
Oh, this software saves 50% on such and such a process.
Well, how do you know? Oh, this software can be installed in three months.
Well, Where's the proof?
You know, give me your project plans.
Give me your client sign-offs.
I want to know the proof.
And if you make claims and don't provide proof, the empirical evidence, empirical evidence, then you're dead in the water.
And that's what I mean by humility.
You can't really learn about empiricism.
You can't really learn about reason and evidence unless you've really been in the free market because your strict clients will also ask for that evidence.
This software will save you X dollars.
Where's the proof? Anybody can say that.
Anybody can manipulate a spreadsheet to make anything look good, but where are the facts?
Where's the proof? Where's the real client testimonials?
Who are the people that I can talk to who are going to verify this independently?
And you don't see that except, really, really see that except in the free market.
And this has been my criticism of the political campaigns.
The political campaigns make all these claims.
You know, well, Ron Paul didn't win, but he educated people.
And people are more receptive and open to libertarian ideas than they used to be.
Well, where's the proof?
I can certainly understand that people will say that if tens of millions of dollars of funding are at stake.
Yeah, people will say whatever, right?
Oh, yeah, this offer saves you X amount of dollars.
Like, where's the proof?
Right? And, you know, salespeople will, if they go to a meeting where they're supposed to sell something and they don't sell it, they say, well, but I raised the awareness of the product.
Which means what?
In terms of cold, hard cash, right?
Which means what? Anyone can say anything that they want.
But the evidence is where it really counts.
And this is what I got sort of exasperated about in looking at...
I mean, if you put yourself in the mind of an investor, which is sort of how I look at proposals in these sorts of spheres and other spheres as well.
But if you look at yourself as a sort of investor, right?
Do I want to invest in the Ron Paul campaign or other political campaigns?
Okay, well, claims are made, right?
Claims are made. This is leading people to liberty, right?
This is helping people to...
This is really opening up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, well, but where's the evidence for that?
Where's the studies? Where's the research?
Where are the facts? And not anecdotal stuff, because anecdotal stuff, as we all know, is meaningless.
It's completely meaningless.
Oh, well, so-and-so found their way to philosophy through the Ron Paul campaign.
It's like, well, that certainly may be true, but it really...
I just took my parking spot.
He should be in a Beamer, but he's in a Mercedes.
Well, same def, I guess. Um...
Where are the facts? Where's the proof?
Because I've also been on the other side where people are presenting plans to me.
People are presenting R&D plans or even business plans or I've been the sort of skeptical voice in helping people to work through their business plans.
It's like, don't make these claims if you can't back them up.
Please don't make these claims. It's going to be much worse for you if you make claims and then you don't have any proof because then you've just destroyed your credibility in a very fundamental way.
And that's why I've always been looking for, when people make these claims, where's the proof?
Where's the facts? Have you invested in the research to actually validate this?
Or are you just saying stuff to get money?
Which to me, is pretty sleazy.
See, to me at least, the free market fundamentally is about empiricism.
In a way that statism and central planning clearly is not...
Statism and central planning are about opinions, not empiricism.
For a number of reasons.
Obviously, government programs empirically do the opposite of working.
And because they rely on force, they are anti-empirical.
And force is the ultimate weapon against empiricism.
So if you're some central planner in a centrally planned economy, it's your opinion that the five-year plan should aim for this.
It's your opinion that the timber should go to Vladivostok and not St.
Petersburg or Petrograd.
It's just your opinion.
And because it's your opinion, to make things happen, you need empiricism of some kind to make things happen.
And if you just have opinions, then the empiricism that you bring to bear to make things happen is called force.
It's called violence, right?
Right, so if I'm going to throw you a ball, then I'm going to rely on empiricism to have it, and I'm going to throw it towards you, hopefully at the right lob, and you're going to catch it, all using empiricism.
That's how something's going to happen.
But if I want to enforce an opinion, I have to use force because the opinion is not supported by empirical reality.
So I have to substitute the empirical, quote, reality of violence.
And violence is a very real empirical reality.
reality.
The empirical reality is that people do not want to fund government programs, because if they did, it would be a charity, and you wouldn't need force.
The empirical reality is that people do not want to fund government programs because if they did, it would be a charity and you wouldn't need force.
But the reality is that people do not want to fund government programs.
But the reality is that people do not want to fund government programs.
That's the empirical reality.
That's the empirical reality.
And we know that's the empirical reality because force, as an empirical reality, is substituted for the empirical reality that would come out of voluntarism, right?
So voluntarism, people wouldn't fund government programs.
That's the empirical reality.
So they have to substitute the empirical, quote, reality a force to make up for that.
So it's all about empiricism, but the free market is really about empiricism, and the empiricism is price.
This is not my insight, of course, but it goes back to 1920s writings from von Mises.
The empiricism that matters in the free market is price, which is a reflection of demand and of value and all these kinds of good things.
And in the real world...
You can't really get away with promising people something and not delivering.
You can't. I mean, just try it.
Try setting up an eBay store, offering to sell people some sort of doodad, some sort of etch-a-sketch, and then you never ship it to them.
You take the money, you never ship it to them.
How long is that going to last, right?
And this is, again, sort of another fundamental issue that I have for the political system, is that it relies...
Like, it's non-empirical, which means that it's associated with force.
In fact, it's anti-empirical, and people actually resist.
Non-empirical is, I've just never thought of it.
Anti-empirical is, I'm going to oppose the suggestion.
So, I have called, many times, for years, for people in the political movement to provide empirical evidence...
About the efficacy of their approach.
And they don't.
They just slide into anecdotes and quasi-religious wish fulfillment and so on, right?
Like, I'm doing all this and somehow magically it's going to produce freedom even though it has done the opposite of that in history.
Somehow, it's all just going to turn around.
Which means that, I mean, political activism is essentially just another government program, because it follows all the same patterns, as I've argued before, of a government program.
And what was it that got me out of that groove?
Well, I'm telling you, it's the free market.
The free market makes you humble.
The free market makes you, if you want to succeed, the free market makes you rigidly, slavishly, Empirical.
And it helps you to avoid making statements, particularly if you're in tech and you have to make these things that have promised happen.
It helps you to rigidly avoid making statements that are unsubstantiated.
And you could say that this is true of science as well, but it kind of isn't.
It kind of isn't, because science is largely statist.
I mean, some of it isn't, right? Consumer developed science is not, right?
But it's largely statist.
And so for most scientists, as is true for most academics, who is the end consumer?
Who is the end consumer of the Hadron Collider?
Well, nobody.
Because it's political money, right?
And it's just a way of enslaving scientists who could really help the freedom movement, could really help the freedom movement.
If you took the empiricism and rationality and peer-reviewed data examination of scientists and you put that on status policies, status programs...
Then statism would fall.
Statism would fall. If the scientists could be roped in, so to speak, if they could be liberated from their addiction to statist money, then you applied the same rigor, the same science, the same approach, then statism would fall.
And that's why scientists get so much government money.
Again, I'm not saying it's a conscious plan, but everybody understands these things deep down.
In the same way that if philosophers had as their end consumer people who could actually use philosophy to live, which is my end consumer, if it actually had to do shit in the real world, if philosophy wasn't just something you kind of admired like a butterfly pinned under glass, but something you actually had to take out and wrestle with and put to work… Well, you would end up with a very different philosophy, which is why the philosophy here is completely different than philosophy.
It's the opposite of the philosophy that goes on in academia.
I was reading an article recently about how philosophical academics are enthralled by the television series Lost.
Because, I guess, they threw a couple, like Rousseau and Locke, and they threw a couple of philosophers' names into the characters, and they apparently are just all drooly and agog about the symbolism of lost and so on, right?
And that's just sickening.
It's just sickening and revolting, is what it is.
You know, that at a time when society is, you know, really close to collapse...
Because of moral problems.
You've got philosophers who are literally writing books and articles.
A number of books and articles coming out from academic philosophers about a goddamn television show.
I mean, it's unbelievably insane.
It's unbelievably insane.
But that's what goes on in academia.
And why? Because who's their customer?
Wow. Certainly not the students.
And if the students are the customer, it's because the students are looking to get their way into this protected industry.
Not because the students actually want to bring philosophy, you know, bring it to life.
You know, like Frankenstein, bring this 2,500-year-old corpse to life and have it go around freshly centered and embracing the citizenry.
Putting it to use, right?
No, no. We can't have that, right?
And so philosophers and scientists have to be kept away from the state.
And the best way that you keep someone away from a topic is you bribe them so that their hypocrisy, their innate hypocrisy, will cause them to stay away from the topic, right?
So if the government pays for or protects the The economists, right, because most economists work for either academia or government organizations or NGOs, which are closely related, foreign aid programs and other sorts of things, which get a lot of government money.
Or they work for the World Bank, which is a statist institution, or they work for government agencies, or they work for large financial institutions, which are state-protected and state-dependent.
So, the economists, the scientists, and the philosophers, and you could sort of go through the list, well, they're all bought and paid for, and therefore, they're not going to criticize the state, because the moment they criticize the state, their own hypocrisy is exposed to them, that they value voluntarism in their own profession, and they take blood money from a violent organization.
It's always funny to me to read people in the free market, free market economists or whatever, talking about the value of the free market.
I mean, it's It's like a bad joke.
For the sake of better evidence and better arguments, it's something that really gets pounded into you if you're a successful entrepreneur.
Or if you're a successful entrepreneur, it's because it has been pounded into you.
And I think that is something that has had a huge influence on me, and I certainly would like to hear your thoughts about it.
▲
Export Selection