Some blog comments that I found useful the last few days - Bitcoin edition

Although these are old they summarize well some of the problems with deflationary currency and with the attempt of maintaining two currencies in parallel. They stress some aspects that I had overlooked in my recent post on Bitcoin.

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We live in a capitalistic society. Lets assume, we will replace the dollar by bitcoins. And now let us found a company to produce some goods we want to sell. First we need money. We get it from a bank or investor, let's say 100 Bitcoins. The investor gives it to us for 10%. So in a year we have to pay back 110 bitcoins. The goods we want to produce could all together be sold for let's say 130 bitcoins. So we expect to win 20 bitcoins.

While we build up our company and produce the goods, the value of the bitcoin increases. What does it mean? Our debt increases in value, the material we bought, looses its value. When we start selling our products, their value in sum is at 105 bitcoins, because our consumers expect to get more out of a bitcoin then when we started our business. Our bank/investor still expects 110 bitcoins, which is 5 bitcoins more than we made.

---- "ThomasW" commenting on a piece by Joshua Gans in Economist's View, December 2013.

Incidentally, yes, Bitcoin could conceivably become a currency if enough merchants decided to transact in Bitcoins. The problem with this is that Bitcoin would be inevitably pushed out by the dollar because two-currency zones are inherently unstable. Part of the idea of currencies as fiat is the idea that standardization provides economic benefits. An economy where the workers are paid in Bitcoins but have to buy services in USD means that exchange markets would be a complete mess, with every payday pushing Bitcoin prices skyward as employers hurriedly bought Bitcoins to pay their employees with, only to fall back down again as those Bitcoins were then hurriedly sold by their employees to buy USD again and continue the cycle anew. The only people who would make money would be the currency exchangers, adding a deadweight loss to the economy by taking their spread each payday. The economy would eventually abandon either Bitcoin or USD because doing so would be more optimal. But they would likely abandon Bitcoin. USD has the fiat of the largest military power on the planet behind it, Bitcoin has a bunch of idiots with overheating video cards.

And in fact, that's exactly what's happened to the Bitcoin economy, albeit on a smaller scale. You simply can't promote a traditional capitalist currency without being a government with guns on your side and a claim to power.

---- "Libertardian" commenting on a post on the Buttcoin blog, ca. January 2013.

Some posts and articles that I enjoyed the last few days

The real reason theism isn’t taken seriously is because it’s completely ill-defined. If we would presume to contemplate theism from an intellectually honest perspective, we would try to decide what kind of universe we would expect to live in if theism were true; then we would do the same for naturalism; and finally we would compare those expectations to the real world. But when we do that we find theistic expectations failing to match reality over and over again.

Now, I know perfectly well (from experience as well as from cogitation) that you can never make headway with theists by claiming “If God existed, He would do X, and He doesn’t” (where X is “prevent needless suffering,” “make His existence obvious,” “reveal useful non-trivial information to us,” “spread religious messages uniformly over the world,” etc.) Because they have always thought through these, and can come up with an explanation why God would never have done that. (According to Alvin Plantinga, our world — you know, the one with the Black Death, the Holocaust, AIDS, Hurricane Katrina, and so on — is “so good that no world could be appreciably better.”)

But these apologetic moves come at a price: they imply a notion of theism so flexible that it becomes completely ill-defined. That’s the real problem. Craig’s way of putting it is to suggest that God is “like the cosmic artist who wants to splash his canvas with extravagance of design.” That’s precisely why naturalism has pulled so far ahead of theism in the intellectual race to best model our world: because it plays by rules and provides real explanations for why the world is this way rather than that way.

---- Sean Carroll

I use the word "proof" to refer to scientific proof rather than deductive logical or mathematical proof. Scientific proof does not provide absolute certainty, but is more like the proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that is applied in criminal courts in the United States. I dispute the common assertion that you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. You can, if you mean scientific proof. [...] the hypothesis I am testing is not what Pigliucci seems to think Dawkins and I are doing, namely asking for some kind of physical evidence for the nature of a supernatural being. Rather we are asking for tangible evidence - scientific evidence - that a God who plays an important role in the universe exists. If such a God exists, then his actions should leave some observable effects in the real world, effects that should be at least as obvious as the footprints in the snow of passing wildlife that I see in the field behind my house. I rarely actually see those animals, but I know they exist. God has left no footprints on the snows of time.

---- Victor Stenger in Science Religion & Culture

What's striking about the modern world is indeed that atheists and believers have a lot in common, but the main thing that they share is a belief in reason and science. To go back to physics, which Gopnik mentions: do you know of any believers who don't believe in the laws of physics? In gravity? In the roundness of the earth? That the sun will rise in the morning? Do you know any believers for whom the majority of their beliefs don't spring from material reality? Probably not.

Even believers, then, live their lives according to science and reason 99% of the time. It’s only regarding that other 1% of things–which concerns issues like the creation of the universe, or faith in a supernatural power–that many believers depart from the scientific consensus. I imagine most religious people are as rigid about a belief in gravity as the average atheist, so why is the atheist scolded for rigid scientism when he or she also believes in the areas of science that conflict with religion?

I yearn to read a piece that, rather than scolding atheists for being scientifically minded, actually noted that we are all scientifically minded. And hooray for us.

---- Isaac Chotiner in the New Republic

If you're interested in passing moral judgment on everyone who walks through the door, maybe the restaurant industry isn't for you.

---- Ed of Gin and Tacos on US-American conservatives who argue that "religious freedom" means being allowed to refuse service to people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Hobgoblins

Some time ago, deep in the understorey of the internet, I argued that somebody was advancing an intellectually inconsistent position, and was rewarded with the witty reply "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".

I was then puzzled about two things. First, how one could be so cavalier about not contradicting oneself; I had rather assumed that that was a necessary precondition for making sense. Second, where that quotation came from, for I assumed that it had not originated with the blogger who was hurling it at me.

Thanks to Ana Mardoll I have now found out where it came from. Wikiquote (accessed 31 Dec 2013) has a large collection of quotes on the topic of intellectual consistency, and they must have been assembled by someboy who is very much of one mind with the guy mentioned above because they pretty much all ridicule the concept:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well, so it appears at first sight. Of course it would not matter anyway what a bunch of famous people thought on a topic because it is quite possible that they were all idiots honestly mistaken. But if we look closer, we notice that there are actually two sets of quotes here. There are those that proudly declare that you do not have to make any sense if you are just awesome enough (apparently without wondering how we are supposed to recognize awesome people as awesome if they contradict themselves all the time). In addition to the hobgoblin one, for example:

Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not. --- Stephen Vizinczey

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. --- Oscar Wilde

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art. --- George Bernard Shaw

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. --- F. Scott Fitzgerald

No idea who Vizinczey is, by the way. And then there are a few that have a completely different thrust:

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing. --- Miguel de Unamuno

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. --- Bernard Berenson

A silly ass ... wrote a paper to prove me inconsistent. ... Inconsistency is the bugbear of fools! I wouldn't give a damn for a fellow who couldn't change his mind with a change of conditions. --- John Arbuthnot "Jacky" Fisher

The facts changed. Since the facts changed, I changed my position. What do you do, sir? --- John Maynard Keynes

These are quotes in which people defend themselves for having been inconstent not in the same argument, but inconsistent over time. In other words, they argue that being able to change one's mind is a virtue. And it is; it is the opposite of being unreasonable and dogmatic. I do hope that whoever organized that Wikiquote entry is aware that there are two completely unrelated issues.

But even given that being able to change one's mind in the face of new evidence or better arguments is good, I have to stay by my original position in this case. Intellectual consistency in one and the same discussion is not a goblinoid of whatever species (whether hobgoblin or bugbear). It is not an unworthy obsession of those who have run out of arguments. It is the first, lowest hurdle you have to clear for your position to make any sense whatsoever. Only after it is clear that you aren't obviously contradicting yourself is it even worth the effort to check whether your position is also supported by evidence.

For example, those who use 'faith' and 'religion' as insults when discussing other people's beliefs and criticize them for not having an evidence based worldview but then turn around and promote their own religious faith should be laughed out of the conversation. And somebody who manages to write in two consecutive sentences that (1) there is no clear line between the birds and the non-avian dinosaurs that were their ancestors and (2) there is such a strong divergence between birds and non-avian dinosaurs that we should accept the latter as a paraphyletic taxon without realizing what they have just done does not deserve to be taken seriously.

People who contradict themselves within the same line of argumentation may be confused, they may be dishonest, or they may be insane, and at least in the first case pointing the problem out to them may be helpful. But those who are downright proud of making incoherent arguments simply do not have anything to offer to rational discourse. They aren't misunderstood geniuses surrounded by nagging little minds, they are charlatans.

People saying interesting things about creationism

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.
    Katha Pollitt

(The same goes for many other conspiracy theories and denialisms, by the way.)

The fact remains that the human body is pretty much of a disaster from the standpoint of basic engineering. We'd better hope we're the result of a long, haphazard evolutionary process, because any designer responsible for human anatomy has an awful lot of explaining to do.
    Jason Rosenhouse

Creationists like terms like "different view" or "alternate view", because those sound much nicer than "wrong". I would love to be able to present my bank with a book entitled "Five Minus Three: A Different View", in which, through rhetorical wordplay, ad hominem attacks, and general ramblings, convince them that five minus three is in fact FOUR, and that my checking account should be retroactively adjusted accordingly.
    Bryan Lambert