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Feb. 7, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:47
True but... Compared to What?
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Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to try a little new thing, a little new thing tonight, which is...
So, I've been having the urge to go back to my roots, my roots of rock and roll, the blues, and to solo casts.
But, I've got to tell you, solo casts sometimes feel a bit isolated, a bit bubble-y, as in I'm in a bubble.
And so, I wanted to try doing...
I guess a new way of running this stuff, which is to do a stream to our good friends, our supporters, our philosophy of the show, put forward a thesis and have it disassembled by the expert bulk brain of the listeners and the supporters.
So that's what we're going to take a swing at.
Tonight there were two topics, I mean pretty fundamental topics, two philosophy, that were floating around on the board.
One of them was the question of value, what is value, and of course the other was the question of truth.
So I want to do the truth thing first, get some feedback, and then tell you what I think about the term or the word value.
Now, the truth thing, you know, I talk about it in Essential Philosophy.
You can get for free at EssentialPhilosophy.com.
I talk about it in On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, my first book, but it's, you know, it's one of these topics that it never hurts to revisit at all.
So, let's start off with the topic of truth.
And it's a big topic.
It's really the foundational of philosophy, which is what is true.
And with all aspects of philosophy, we must always ask, first and foremost, compared to what?
We say, ah, this statement is true.
Okay, well, compared to what?
Well, compared to something that's not true or And this is a big category that I wanted to talk about tonight with you guys' thoughts and feedback on it.
The other category is there's true, false, and unverifiable.
True, false, and unverifiable.
And everybody thinks it's like this bichromatic rainbow of true and false.
But I'm going to argue that we also do want to talk about the issue of what is unverifiable.
So, a true statement, right?
A true statement. Let's take a simple example.
True statement. An elephant is a mammal, all right?
Has hair, is warm-blooded, gives worth the life young, that kind of stuff, right?
So an elephant is a mammal.
Okay, that's a statement that can be verified.
It's true. Now, a false statement is, I was an elephant last night.
I, being Steph, or a human being, say, I was an elephant last night.
Well, what's interesting is that because it is a contradictory phenomenon, in other words, I'm sort of breaking the law of identity by saying, I am myself a human being, but last night I was an elephant.
That's impossible. It's not possible.
And therefore, it is false and does not need to be verified.
In other words, we don't need to say, well, I'm going to need some footage of you last night to find out if you were, in fact, an elephant or not, right?
So that's false by definition.
The first one is true by definition in that mammal is a synonym for the characteristics that an elephant has.
Now, the other category is potentially true but unverifiable.
So, first statement, an elephant is a mammal.
Second statement, I was an elephant last night.
Third statement, I had a dream about an elephant last night.
I had a dream about an elephant last night.
Now, is that possible?
Sure. Is it verifiable?
Well, even if we had some magical means or some high-tech means appearing within people's dreams, It would not be verifiable because I wasn't hooked up to it last night.
So when I say, you know, you say, oh, well, they're going to put you up to a sort of lie detector and so on, as in my daughter playing among us, but they're not particularly reliable.
And voice stress analyzers are basically rolling the dice.
So I say, I had a dream about an elephant last night.
It is potentially true, but it is unverifiable.
So we can't say that it's true in the same way that we say the Earth is a sphere or elephants or mammals and so on, but it's also not false by definition because it's not impossible.
So the interesting question to me is, and I want to get you guys' thoughts right at the beginning here, the interesting question to me is how much of your day, I mean, if we just broadly look at these three categories, right, true, False by definition and unverifiable.
How much of your day is spent in each category?
And it's a real rule.
I was sort of thinking about this myself.
It's kind of a rule of thumb thing. You can't get down to exact percentages or anything like that.
But what part of your day, how much of your day is spent on unverifiable?
Or stuff that's hard to verify.
And certainly if you're involved in politics, if you do science, then hopefully you're in the former.
If you are a psychic, you're almost completely in the last category of unverifiable.
I mean, it's not impossible for there to be some extrasensory perception, although it's pretty hard to sort of figure it out in the realm of physics.
It's not impossible by definition.
It's not entirely self-contradictory.
But it remains in the I had a dream about an elephant last night level of unverifiability.
Actually, it's even further down the category of unverifiability because you could have a dream about an elephant last night, but nobody's ever proved psychic or extrasensory perception phenomenon.
So the job of philosophy is to say, okay, what is truth?
Well, truth is the relationship between what is in your mind and The formulations that you have in your mind that are claimed to be universal, right?
Truth and subjectivity have a very interesting relationship.
If I say, I like Adele as a singer, is that a true statement?
Yeah, I mean, I guess if I play music a lot and so on, and I'm not a masochist, although some would say that the two would be in similar categories...
That's a somewhat, you know, it's a somewhat verifiable statement, but it's relatively unimportant.
In terms of philosophy, it might be interesting in terms of marketing.
If you want to sell Adele albums, you might figure out who likes her the most and market to them and, you know, the sort of algorithms of who you market to, who you sell to.
That's just important and interesting stuff from an economic standpoint, but not necessarily from a philosophical standpoint.
Personal subjective tastes and preferences and opinions and so on, they have a truth, but that truth is not universal.
That truth is not universal. If I say, I like Adele, I'm not claiming a universal statement.
Now, if I say, I like Adele because she's a great singer, okay, well, then there's some ways to measure the quality of a singer, the range, the tone, the pitch, perfection of the singing, and so on.
There's ways to sort of figure that stuff out.
But then there are people, you know, Bob Dylan and so on, not great singers, but very popular songwriters and performers.
So, in the realm of truth, the subjective statements are really the realm of aesthetics or marketing or stuff like that, not really the realm of philosophy because they're not claiming to make objective statements.
I like Adele is no more really the province of philosophy than I like chocolate is the realm of philosophy.
Subjective personal preferences, which make no objective or universal claims, are not really the province of philosophy.
Because when people talk about being philosophical, the way that I would certainly formulate the argument that I make is that they're saying that they have an objectively true statement to make about empirical reality.
So, sorry.
I know that I'd asked you guys, but I realize the categories are still a little blurred, so let me sort of comb them out a little bit more before I ask sort of what part of your life, how much of your life is spent in each particular realm.
I'm not saying these are the only realms.
I think these are the three major categories.
But I don't spend much of my time in false by definition, because I just...
That's what crazy people say.
Insane people say, I was an elephant last night.
And I just don't spend much time around crazy people, so...
That is... And even...
So we had the conversation on Sunday about bannings and so on, and in a conversation I had with someone who'd left or had been banned or something like that, I said, well, you said this, and he said, no, I didn't.
Now, normally, that's kind of unverifiable.
If you have a recording, of course, you can go back and play it, but you usually can't interrupt the conversation in order to do so.
So there is some verifiability.
So if somebody says...
You always do this in some relation.
You have a fight with your girlfriend. She says, well, you always do this.
And then, of course, as a male, in the male brain, you look for the first exception.
You say, well, I remember a time when I didn't do that.
And then she gets frustrated because she says, well, okay, but you know what I meant, which is you generally or you mostly.
And you say, well, that's not what you said. What you said is I always find one counterexample.
You're proven false and so on. So there's an example where somebody's making a universal statement, you always think of one counterexample, and you've broken the universality of the statement, and then it becomes sort of a sliding scale.
And this happens quite a lot, of course, in personal relationships.
And in the realm of philosophy, what we're doing is we're saying, I mean, it's almost axiomatic, or you could say it's almost a tautology.
That statements which claim universality must pass the test of universality.
So statements which claim universality must pass the test of universality.
If I say an elephant is a mammal, I've got a definition of a mammal, I've got the characteristics of an elephant, and I'm saying that they're universally true.
And if you have an elephant that's not a mammal, then it's not an elephant.
If you can imagine some bizarre lizard.
Or amphibian that had all of the outward characteristics of an elephant.
Maybe we find it on some other planet or something, but it is in fact cold-blooded.
It doesn't have any hair in its body.
I guess that would be one of the characteristics.
Or it doesn't give birth to life young or something like that.
So we have a statement in the mind which claims to be mapped onto objective and universal reality, which we get through the senses, through the sense data.
And If it passes the test of universality, then it is potentially true.
If it doesn't pass the test of universality, then it is not a truth statement that is related to philosophy.
Then it's a personal preference statement.
Somebody says, I like the color blue...
Is that really the province of philosophy?
No, it may be the province of fashion or interior decoration or something like that.
It's not really the province of philosophy, I would say, at all.
Philosophy concerns itself with universals, and then in particular, philosophy concerns itself with moral universals, which we'll get to in a second when we talk about value.
But yeah, just for those who are listening, do you spend a lot of time, and if there are other categories, throw them my way, but do you spend a lot of time In objective truths, did the code compile?
Will the bridge stay up?
Did you make the sale? Something that's testable in objective reality.
Do you spend a lot of time on things which are unverifiable?
Do you spend a lot of time discarding things which are directly contradictory, self-contradictory, two and two makes five kind of stuff?
When it comes, and I imagine this shows up in your jobs probably more, certainly could show up in your personal life.
Is it the case that you spend a lot of time on one of these sort of three categories?
True by definition?
True but unverifiable?
And false by self-contradiction?
How many hours do you pour into each bucket?
Without going into detail of my work, yesterday we had this situation, and it spilled over to today, where I do software development as a job.
We had a contradiction, and We had to fix it.
We had to appeal to truth in order to fix it because a contradiction would mean, oh, well, that doesn't really work.
You know, and then we don't get paid, essentially, down the road.
That's what it directly leads into.
So, yes, I mean, that's very...
Very much an object lesson in a very real sense of this code doesn't work as expected.
It worked in this situation, it didn't work here.
What's the difference? And we had to really work hard to figure out what that was and resolve it to make it consistent.
I know it's not quite in the abstract category you're talking about, but that was real life what we had to deal with this past two days.
Well, no, I would say it is in the first category.
So, universals don't necessarily mean everywhere, all the time, across the entire planet, through, like, all dimensions.
I mean, in the way that two and two make four.
But we don't sit there and say, okay, it works on my computer, it doesn't work on your computer.
I mean, I remember one of the very first pieces of professional code I produced...
I took to my boss.
It was analyzing storage on a tandem computer to figure out when they needed to upgrade or a tandem operating system.
COBOL 74. So I extracted all the data.
I ran it through a database. I created a navigatable chart that you could sort of drill down and look at all.
It was a cool piece of code and it told them where all the storage was being used because storage was crazy expensive on those systems back in the day.
And I took my very proud piece of first professional code to my boss.
And I tested it on a couple of people's machines, but he was one of these freaks who'd screwed around with his date settings.
Like, you know, you expect month, day, year, maybe a day, month, year.
But he was one of these guys who goes year, day, month.
And I just hadn't written code to handle such a freaky way of displaying or working with dates, right?
So I had to convert them to a long integer and...
And then reformulate them and all that kind of stuff.
And I put a bunch of masks in for various forms of dates.
And I remember it didn't work on his computer, a particular function that relied on date parsing.
And I came back and the other programmers in the room were just kind of laughing and said, did he get you on the date?
Did he get you on the date?
And I said, hey, that's a me too thing.
And no, I said, yeah, you got me on the date.
And he's like, yeah, he keeps his dates that way to figure out how detail-oriented the programmers are.
And it's like, yeah, that's a good lesson.
And it was really important.
So, you know, it worked on two computers.
It didn't work on someone who had some freaky flow and backwards through time way of working with dates.
So, by universal, that's kind of what I'm talking about.
It doesn't mean that it's a universal principle like gravity.
It means that there's universality involved.
in other words if if uh if you have a problem with your computer and and you you phone someone you have a problem with that particular program and i don't know if you've ever had this and they say well it works at my end and you think well i'm not coming to your house to work it now am i so the important thing is it doesn't work at my end which is why everybody tries to remote dial into your computers to solve your issues and all that kind of stuff so universal just means it's a And so the code that you were working with has to work on the client side.
It has to work on various machines.
It has to work with different date settings.
The more universal the code becomes, the better.
And of course, a lot of programming is relying on layers.
I'm thinking sort of like Unity for video game programming, SQL for database querying.
And there are application frameworks or SDKs that allow you to build apps that work on iOS, on Android.
I don't think that they double up with Windows as well or triple up with Windows as well.
But they're trying to make things more universal so that they'll work in every environment.
And I think that's the level of universality that I would be thinking of, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, I mean, very much, you know, it worked in our local test environment, and it did not work in our staging environment.
And that's pretty much exactly what it was.
And it turned out it wasn't even the program itself.
We had to dig in to basically a proxy that basically took the request from the outside world and handed it off to the inside apps.
And the translation was incorrect in staging.
So that's effective.
You know, we didn't catch that until we had to dig at it for a while.
So, yeah. I also remember back in the day, writing a program that produced reports, testing it on, because, you know, again, I had the date example from the very beginning of my career, testing on a wide variety of machines, wide variety of servers, and it all worked.
Until we installed it, and then they said it didn't work, a DLL call.
And it turns out that every single time I had tested it, I had been logged into the server, and what they did was they left the server, but nobody logged in.
So nobody was logged into the server, and that was the issue.
And of course, I was like, well, you could just leave someone logged into the server.
It's like, that's a big security issue.
So I had to change things up quite a bit to make things work on a server that I just did.
It never occurred to me, of course, because whenever you test things, you've got to log in to test it, right?
So it had never crossed my mind.
To have a call across the network to a server where nobody was logged in because you log in to test, right?
So, yeah, mine failed the test of universality.
And I guess yours also failed the test of universality because the whole point of designing things is to have them work everywhere.
There's no point really designing things that just work on one computer or your computer or this particular type of computer in this particular type of environment you want to make it.
As universal as possible, that's the whole Java thing, right?
Like write once, run everywhere.
So I think certainly for those of us who are dealing in objective reality and reproducibility and universality, I think we do want things to work everywhere, and that is kind of the requirement.
And when it fails to do that, we have failed the test of universality, and I think that's sort of the first question of does it work?
I mean, so is there anyone else who sort of floats around these particular...
Because I can certainly think of professions where you're dealing in much more subjective states.
I do a lot of work on entrepreneurship and business strategies.
And so much of my job is listening to entrepreneurs give a hypothesis about what they think about the market or their product or whatever, and then telling them, We're explaining to them that they have no way to prove that's true and they have to go out and actually get the data and look at the customer behavior to turn it into something that's actually verifiable.
Right. I remember reading about this and then ending up talking about it when I was in China many years ago to do business and people were like, well, you know, the Chinese market is this big and if we could just get 1% of that market, this translates into X amount of dollars, which was usually a pretty large sum of money.
And it's like, well... Yeah, but it's also like saying, you know, a lot of computers get sold every year, man.
If we could just get 1% of those sales, we'd make a lot of money.
And it's like, but, I mean, especially if you're doing something different.
You know, Windows and Apple, they've got like 99% of the, but if we introduce another computer and just get 1% of that, it's like, yeah, but introducing a whole new operating system and so on and getting people to adopt it, it's pretty rough, man.
It's pretty tough. And so there's that 1% wish list, right, where people are like, if we could just do this, it's like, Yeah, but how do you get there?
What are the objective measures?
And I remember, not to say anything positive about Bill Gates, who I know is kind of on the outs these days, but when he first left Microsoft and went into the charity business, there was, you know, tons of money being spent and lots of PowerPoints and business plans, and I think it was being delivered to Africa, and he's like, okay, well, how many nets have been delivered over the last year?
It's sort of this long. It's like, but we got a statement of values, abstract PowerPoint about corporate values.
And it's like, well, that's all well and good, I suppose.
But, you know, quick question again, how many have you actually delivered?
And they couldn't tell them. It's like, well, you can't manage what you can't measure.
So first thing we need to do is get some metrics in place to know whether we're doing better or worse and so on.
And so, yeah, that definitely is a way of saying...
As the old thing in business, a wish is not a strategy, a hope is not a business plan.
Crossing your fingers and spreadsheets are not real life.
Potential sales, potential profits, if...
And they're fine. You've got to do that because you've got to measure against it, but they're not the same as actual profits, money in the bank, if that makes sense.
Oh, yeah. And I think in one of your...
Little tech rants before Colin, like a couple weeks ago, you were talking about actually make it so that the customer can use it.
And the question that always comes up with these entrepreneurs is like, okay, you know, oh, we can make this thing that fixes this problem for these people.
And it's like, great, how many of them have you actually talked to?
And then there's this long, awkward silence.
Right. Or how many people have that problem and what is the estimated economic value of solving it?
All of that is a potential.
There's only a potential market.
Let's say people find it $10 worth of value and you can sell them something for $5.
Okay. But...
You're competing with every other $5 that they could spend.
They've got to be informed.
They've got to understand. You've got to motivate them to act, to actually buy.
So translating things from theory to practice is pretty tough because everyone says, well, I can sell someone something for $5 that saves them $10.
It's like, but you can't sell them that for $5, I would say.
And people would say, no, no, no, the manufacturing costs are $5.
What the hell do the manufacturing costs have to do with anything?
I mean, they have a little bit to do with it, but not much.
Because you having 10,000 widgets in a garage doesn't translate to shit when it comes to selling stuff.
Like, what are you talking about? It's going to save people $10 and it only costs $5.
It's like, yes, but what's your marketing budget?
Because if people don't know about it...
You might as well have not built it.
In fact, it would be better for you not to build it because you won't have wasted all that time and money.
If you don't have a strategy by which you can get people to understand the value proposition and actually act on it, then you building something that saves 10 bucks but only costs 5 bucks is worse than useless.
And everybody loves to build, right?
Nobody loves to market and sell.
At least that's not the way people go as a whole.
So yeah, that's... A sort of theoretical to practical translation of projected sales into real sales.
Yeah, that's, you know, that is in the realm of philosophy for sure because you're saying, what is the comparison?
Is it true, your projections, your sales?
And there are, of course, also a large number of people who don't have people hammer back against, you know, the most successful businesses or anything in life.
Tend to be those areas where you put forward a proposition, as we're kind of doing here, and people can sort of hammer back against it.
And you see this in dating all the time.
All the time. You know, some guy gets infatuated with a girl.
And none of his friends can say anything bad about her.
Otherwise, they're being disloyal.
They're not allowing him to be happy.
They're mindlessly critical.
They're jealous because she's such a great girl and all that.
And so, you know, he's got a plan called...
I'm going to have a wonderful relationship, but he denies any feedback on the qualities of the woman, and therefore it's like somebody who's like, I've got a great business plan.
Oh, really? Let's have a look at it, and let's hammer it and see what's next.
No! I'm just going to use my inheritance.
And people who resist that kind of examination of their ideas and arguments, well, I mean, that's because deep down they know it's not really...
It's not really the case.
What they believe is not really the case at all.
Anyone else? Because again, if you have professions out, I think a lot of people who are interested in philosophy are kind of in the first objective, universal stuff.
But do we have people listening in who are dealing with more subjective stuff in marketing, sales, psychology, that kind of stuff?
Because if not, while you sort of gather your thoughts on that, I mean, there's a whole interesting series of, I guess, areas of professions that don't deal with truth.
And in fact, the business model only exists because there's not a rigorous or even remotely strict question of truth and falsehood or application of universal principles.
I'm thinking of things like tarot card readers, And pet psychics and, you know, mediums who claim to be able to communicate with the dead and so on.
All of that kind of stuff is, well, it's in the realm of, you know, because the question of ghosts, right?
The question of ghosts and psychic phenomenon and so on.
You know, ghosts, are they practically impossible?
Yeah. I would say so.
I mean, because life requires mass.
You can't have life without mass.
You can't have life or you can't have an object that exists which is not measurable in any way, shape or form.
In fact, the absence of something is exactly how you know something doesn't exist, right?
I mean, if you throw a basketball at a hoop and it goes down the middle of the hoop, it's because the hoop isn't there, so to speak.
The metal isn't there. That's how you know you have a basket.
So, when people say, oh, I'm going to contact your dead relatives, they're saying, there's life without matter, there's life without mass, there's life without any physical characteristics, and that is a contradiction because you can't take your invisible friend to the ER. You know, if you're a kid, you say, oh, my invisible friend has a broken arm, we need to take him to ER. You may get a couple of doctors who will kind of indulge you if they're not that busy, but...
Nobody really sits there and thinks that's serious and sends a bill and so on.
Because an invisible friend is not really a friend.
It's just, I guess, a psychic scar for loneliness or something.
So there certainly are a lot of bullshit professions out there.
And political projections can be that as well.
You know, there was a whole series of ones that came out of the recent election where, and this is true of Ron Paul back in the day too, like, Ron Paul, there's still a path to victory.
It's like, there really isn't.
In any practical sense, and you saw a lot of this stuff in the money-raising for Trump, and we're going to take these law cases, and we're going to get this election challenged, and we're going to get these, what they call fraudulent results overturned, and so on.
It's like, I don't really think there was much of a path there, because I understand that we are now in the time of political aggression, political violence, and if there's some judge that It's going to hold a presidency and trillions of dollars in his hands.
That judge is going to be subject to a huge amount of unholy pressure.
And so the idea that, but we've got proof, if they say.
Well, proof doesn't matter because proof is not physics, right?
Proof still relies on the frailty of human motivation and so on.
So there are disciplines which are pretty subjective.
A dream analysis, of course, certainly has elements of subjectivity to it.
I've done it myself, and it's not science.
It's a very intuitive kind of thing.
Psychologists, and I don't mean, you know, maybe the more rational cognitive behavioral psychologists, but, you know, they sort of tell me about your feelings and mm-hmm, mm-hmm kind of stuff.
There's not a lot of objectivity or truth principles that are out there for a lot of them.
There certainly is for some.
What else is there in terms of really subjective kind of professions where you don't have that kind of strictness that we're talking about with some of the people here?
So, Steph, you were asking about professions that are less in the objective world, and maybe you have to deal with a little bit more of subjectivity.
And I don't know if this qualifies.
Let me know if this helps.
But I just quit my job as a poker dealer, which I had been doing for roughly a decade.
So is that something that would qualify to you?
Well, I don't think so, because the rules of poker are objective, right?
Yes, you're absolutely right.
I mean, of course, there's the gray areas.
But yeah, in general, they're pretty objective.
Yeah, I mean, certainly if somebody gets a full house or whatever, it doesn't beat, you know, a two and a nine or seven and whatever, right?
So, I mean, there's bluffing for sure, but bluffing is certainly part of the game, right?
So I would say that that's a pretty objective discipline.
Objective doesn't mean predictable to the nth degree, because human beings are not physics, right?
Physics does have to mean predictable largely.
I don't think we would say that meteorology is the same as atomic physics in terms of predictability, but there certainly are principles that are generally the case.
You can't predict weather down to the nth degree, but you can predict the general patterns in the same way that if you know gender and ethnicity, you can predict voting patterns to a large degree, but not down to a level of atomic certainty.
Sure. But yeah, so you don't know if someone's bluffing for sure or not, or you probably don't.
But given that that's part of the game and it's an objective rule in the game, that you're allowed to bluff, and in fact you're encouraged to bluff, I think a lot of times, and that the rules themselves are objective.
I mean, people wouldn't play the game...
If it was purely subjective.
In other words, if you could just make up whatever rule you wanted to win or lose as the dealer.
You know, like if you're doing blackjack and it's like, oh, you went to 23?
Yeah, this round, that's okay.
You know, you pretty much find yourself without players because they would be completely unpredictable then, right?
Yep, yep, absolutely.
Right, right. Now, what about the ferreting out of entirely contradictory stuff?
I think that's...
Quite important. When it comes to sort of code review, then I think that's important.
If your code requires more memory than physically would be present in most computers that you'd be running on, that's kind of important because if you need 12 gigs but only 8 gigs is your average computer, then you have a contradiction there in that the code can't Really run.
If you require and you say, well, I do have an endless loop here, but we'll just use a really fast processor.
It doesn't really break you out of the cycle.
Having a faster processor and endless loop is an endless loop no matter what, right?
So if you're asking for an endless loop to be broken out through speed, then that's another kind of contradiction.
And there's a lot of that goes into code review, I think.
And I remember, oh gosh, back in the day, using a tree control for a program that one particular version of Visual Basic installed its own tree control that conflicted.
And so if my control worked, then the Visual Basic didn't work.
If the Visual Basic tree control worked, then mine didn't work.
And we basically had to go an entire different route to reprogram the tree control.
And so there was a contradiction in that people wanted both to work, but if only one could work, that was bad.
And so I think there is, certainly in coding and in engineering and science, there's a lot of ferreting out of inconsistencies and contradictions.
And that's an attempt, of course, to make sure that you're as firmly established in the first category as you possibly can before investing more.
And that's the same thing with hammering business plans, right?
If you have a path to get 1% of this particular big market and you have some proven ability to do so and you've already made inroads and you've got a value proposition that's irresistible and you've got your competitive analysis and you're coming out ahead in many categories, then you have a possibility.
Now, of course, you can say, well, you have a possibility if you have none of those things, but in a very practical sense, in a very real sense, you don't.
I mean, it's sort of like saying, well, I'm going to put up a random keystroke generator, and through that, I'm going to generate brilliant code.
And it's like, okay, is that technically possible?
Yeah, in the same way that you could have a random...
A random typing program that would also produce wonderful poetry, but it's not practical in any sort of time or predictability sense.
And have you had any encounters with the rank subjectivity fields or endeavors?
The only thing I can think of as an example of subjectivity from the tech world is in the code review, and this was prompted because you mentioned code reviews, And this is sort of resolved not through any objective, but sort of like an agreement.
So like style, coding style.
Do you want to use tabs or spaces?
How far of an indent do you want?
How long should your lines be?
That kind of stuff. That stuff is usually not...
There's nothing really objective about any of that, except possibly code maintenance.
But for the most part...
The subjectivity there is you say, well, it looks good enough to me, or I like the way this looks, and we sort of come to an agreement on what that is, but there's no real...
I don't know if that's quite what you're getting at, but that's the only thing that's subjective about...
Not the only thing that's subjective.
One of the things that's subjective about the work I do on the technical side.
Now, I think that's interesting as well, right?
So, for those of you who don't know, your do-loops, your if-then, your four-wiles and your do-loops and all of that, you tend to have these indented, the if-then statements tend to be indented so that it's easier to read rather than a sort of just a left-hand wall of text.
And, yeah, some people use spaces, some people use tabs.
The civilized ones use tabs and the spaces are for the insane barbarians.
I don't know. I don't know.
If you have a code shop, whatever standard should just be applied to because everybody's just used to that and it's just an efficiency standard.
If it's kind of mixed, then you don't know when you're going into code review.
So one of the ways that tabs are efficient is if you want to get over to the code, you just push your – if it's like, I don't know, you've got a tab of five each and it's 25 characters in you and you have to push five times to get there.
But if it's spaces, you kind of have to hold it down for 25 times or 25 repetition, right?
Yeah. I think?
It kind of depends where you're driving, and it depends which side of the road people drive on, so your blind spot is not too bad.
So there is not an objectively right answer, but there is subjective tradition and preference that you really have to take into account.
And I think the same thing would be true if the sort of tab space controversy or, you know, do you end date two or four?
It also depends how many nested loops you have.
If you have, I don't know, 20 or 30 nested loops, And you've got a five-character indentation.
You need, like, three monitors side-by-side to get to the actual code, whereas if you have fewer loops, then you can have wider spacing, which is easier to read, but it's not going to bleed everything off to the right of the screen too much.
So, yeah, I think that there's an efficiency metric there as well that's important and what people are used to, and certainly you want the longer-term programmers to have as much efficiency as possible because it's pretty easy for new people to figure out one way or the other.
Yep, and that also applies to overall design when it comes to things, because you can make a program that does the same thing, you know, as some other program, program A and program B, whereas program A is just this one huge function that does everything, kick and sink, or program B. And it's not necessarily, that may be appropriate in some circumstances, but just generally speaking, In order to use and maintain that code in the future, you need to come back, and you break it up a bit.
Is that really objective?
Well, I mean, does the code work?
You know, does it do the job?
But that's more of like, like you said, efficiency.
And that is a bit more subjective. Yeah.
Well, and when it comes to this kind of an interesting business discussion too, when it comes to code in particular, so like a bridge got to last for 100 years, probably, right?
Whereas if you look at code, You want to make it efficient and you want to make it maintainable with the understanding that probably every four to seven years, you may have to scrap and rewrite on an entirely new platform.
And so if you make it the most gloriously maintainable code, this code could be maintained for 50 years.
It's like, guess what? This code is never going to be maintained for 50 years, no matter what.
And so this goes back to the debate that I had with...
Mr. Zeitgeist guy, way back in the day, where he's like, well, you could build every tablet to last 100 years.
It's like, yeah, but why would you? Because nobody's going to be using the same tablet 100 years from now.
And it just gets more expensive.
Like, you could make absolutely everything out of ironwood mahogany that's made of wood, but that would be ungodly expensive.
You wouldn't have enough mahogany, and it would be overkill.
You know, would you make balsa wood airplanes out of mahogany?
It's like, well, there wouldn't be balsa wood anymore, right?
So appropriate levels of investment are really important.
Yeah, you could make a house that would last for a thousand years, but, you know, it's very rare that anybody would want a house that would last a thousand years.
You wouldn't be willing to pay for that, right?
Because you sure as hell won't be enjoying it in a thousand years or even a hundred.
So these are all very – sorry, go ahead.
Previously – sorry, I don't want to distract from where you're going, but you were asking about subjective, how we encounter that in our daily lives, and the thing that came to me most often that I encounter is anytime I engage in politics, like trying to vote, trying to persuade someone's opinion, things like that.
That's usually where I encounter subjectivity the most.
Right. And people say, is Trump the better president or is Biden the better president?
And again, that's more compared to what?
For people who are dependent on the state, higher taxes are a good thing.
For people who are paying for that dependence, then lower taxes are a good thing.
So yeah, that's something where once you get the state involved, once you get coercion involved, for the thief, it's very efficient to steal things if he doesn't get caught because he doesn't have to work to pay for them.
Whereas for the people who are getting stolen from, it's very inefficient because they have to then work to catch the thief, pay for his incarceration, and or pay to replace whatever he or she stole.
Oh yeah, when it comes to politics, it to me is really, I mean, it is just one of these boring hypocrisies of sort of modern American politics where they say, well, the election was stolen from Hillary Clinton by shadowy Russian people.
I mean, there was evidence that was very much against it or who stole the information from the DNC servers.
It was Russian hackers, even though it was clearly a thumb drive copy based upon the timestamps and all of that.
So that's something where it's like, well, that election was completely invalid because of shadowy Russian operatives.
And then they launched this massive multi-year investigation.
And I just started reading this book called The Psychology of Stupidity, and I don't think I'm going to make it through.
I'll do my best. The reason I can't make it through is that there's all this pompous windbagging about, oh, it's just amazing how many people believe false things.
And, you know, you look and you see, okay, fine people hoax?
No, no. Fine people hoax?
And it just came out, right? Fine people hoax?
Nope, not going to talk about that.
Russian collusion conspiracy theory?
Nope, not going to talk about that.
How about communism as a whole?
And how inefficient it is.
Nope, not going to talk about that.
How about the injustice of national debts and enslaving children and so on?
Nope, not going to. So, you know, but they will talk about hillbillies who believe in UFOs.
Like, that's a really important cultural consideration and political consideration in the world at the moment.
But they won't talk about people who believe in saying things like the fine people hoax and that Russia stole the election from Hillary Clinton and...
The PP tape, the Christopher Steele stuff, they won't talk about any of that stuff because you can't.
They'll talk about bigoted, anti-Christian, hillbilly stereotypes as why people believe false things, or they'll even bring up things that are false.
I just saw this in an article today.
They're still saying that Trump told people to inject themselves with disinfectant to cure COVID, which is not anything close to what he said.
But so this book, The Psychology of Stupidity, they won't talk about any of the actually stupid and dangerous beliefs that people have.
They'll just talk about beliefs that nobody really gives any credibility to, like UFOs, you know, anally raped my cow last night or something like that.
And that's their big example, but they won't touch any.
So they're actually, they're so completely, it's a collection of essays.
Everybody I've read so far is completely prey to everything.
They're pompously lecturing everyone else about their susceptibility to falsehoods because they're not actually quoting anything that's important when it comes to false things that people believe.
Actually dangerous, you know, communism gets 100 million people plus killed, democide, you know, governments get a quarter billion people killed just in the 20th century, and And yes, they're talking about UFOs and psychic phenomenon that's outlandish and things like that.
And come on. I mean, it's just nuts.
So that stuff is so kind of blindingly predictable.
Yeah, when it comes to politics...
Yeah, you know, you've got hundreds of affidavits.
You've got these voting machines certified to be just push a button and get whatever you want.
You have more people voting than live in the state and are able to vote.
You've got a massive excess of mail-in ballots.
You've got stuff being shut down in the middle of the night, the observers being sent home, and then massive spikes just for one candidate.
I mean, yeah, I think it's really shameful that the U.S. courts rejected it as a whole.
It's kind of predictable. Yeah.
But it's shameful because that's certainly enough evidence that there should be a court case.
And the fact that there wasn't a court case just making people all the more suspicious.
And so, yeah, there's an example where, yeah, there are questions of objective fact around where the votes came from and how legitimate they all were.
And then, of course, you have people destroying thumb drives, losing them, destroying evidence and so on, which, as far as I understand it, is kind of confession.
You destroy evidence, kind of confession.
Under the law, and...
Yeah, it is sort of blindingly predictable.
And that sort of shifts us real quick to the realm of values.
And I'll just make this pretty brief, which is, you know, so Ayn Rand and the objective as approach to values, as she said, a value is that which one acts to gain and or keep.
And I don't know.
I mean, so the question of value is really interesting.
Value to what? To what end?
To whom? At whose expense?
These are all very important.
And generally, The word value is a way of translating desire into and giving it the appearance of some legitimate end, right?
So if you say corporate values, okay, so they're assumed to have some sort of moral or universally preferable element to them.
You know, we value diversity.
We value inclusion.
We value customer service.
We value... So it's just a bunch of...
It's a way of taking a wish list and infusing it with some vague moral positivity.
Because, I mean, a value is simply, in general, another word for a desire.
A lion values capturing the zebra, the zebra values getting away from the lion, but there's no morality involved in that.
And so, to me, the word values is just a way of saying, well, I have this wish list and I wish to infuse it with some vaguely positive moral character, so I'm going to use the word values instead of desires or preferences.
We never say our corporate desire statement.
We wish to make money and screw the competition.
I'm always concerned about these terms and values is one of them.
These terms that infuse some general positive, usually moral aura to something without actually having to go through the pain and challenge of making an actual argument.
When they say diversity is a value, It's like, well, no.
I mean, nobody's ever proven that.
In fact, the data proves quite the opposite, that diversity shatters neighborhoods, destroys social trust.
This is the bowling alone stuff that the guy came out with and sat on the results for like five years because he didn't like where the data led.
So people just repeat the stuff.
Diversity is a value. Diversity is a value.
These are our corporate values and so on.
It's like the word inappropriate, which is a way of trying to infuse a negative moral judgment without actually having to make an objective argument.
Truth is one of these things as well.
If somebody says something is true, they're trying to infuse it with a kind of objectivity without actually having to prove it.
When people said, Russia helped Trump steal the election from Hillary Clinton, they said that as a true statement.
It's a true statement, and so they tried to infuse this paranoid conspiracy theory with an element of truth so that it gains objectivity.
I have my philosophical definitions.
The philosophical definitions of value, which would be to me somewhat indistinguishable from desire or instinct or preference.
But in general, my case is that the words truth and the words truth and value are generally sophist tricks for infusing things that are false, self-contradictory, or highly questionable with its begging the question.
Say something is truth. So something has value.
It's a way of using a sophist argument to imbue a pretty nebulous statement with some kind of objectivity and positive moral character.
And so I would be very careful when you hear the words truth and value as a whole, because usually somebody's trying to spray some cologne in your face so they can pick your pocket.
Well, listen, thanks. It was a very interesting thing.
To have more of a conversation.
A bit of a challenge in a way.
I like the challenge though.
I like the challenge. So I really do appreciate everyone dropping by tonight.
Don't forget to come by tomorrow night for the actual live stream.
I've got some pretty good topics to talk about then.
And yeah, thanks everyone for your support.
A great, great pleasure to chat with you this evening.
And I guess lots of love from here.
As always, I will talk to you soon.
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