My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, it's to point out that it's tautological. It's basically saying, "Prices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law." So it's not a law then, is it? It's an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: "our law says the market will be stable," when we see the absolute opposite in many places.

And if you feel like you've seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again I'd say if you're saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then you're admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.

I'm not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. That's literally what the concept entails. It's analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.

As for the "don't try to time the market" advice, if you're right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they can't rent it out and don't want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they don't exist, or your story about that isn't complete.

I don't need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because I'm familiar with it.

And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However I've never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an "orthodox" school, except in economics. It's the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.

And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you're guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you wont, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.

If you won't agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.

That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.

But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they'll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.

Authority is usually understood by anarchists as a component of hierarchy. I'd be interested to hear your definition that doesn't make it hierarchical.

And there are ways of enforcing rules that don't require authority, like diffuse sanctions, essentially community-based enforcement.

There's a whole school of anti-carceral justice thought that deals with this.

There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can't be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they're probably not people I want to engage with.

And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that's because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren't going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.

Sure, and I'd say that's piracy too. I wouldn't mind if it wasn't also being siloed into private hands to enrich the wealthy and screw the rest of us.

I'm pretty sure it already is. That's why you have assholes rolling coal to trigger the libs.

Words are objects in a sense, although they are abstract, but there is no singular objective language in the same way that there is no objective gender. Both are intersubjective, they are interactions negotiated between subjects. There is no fixed object that you can point to and call "language" independent of a subjective experience of that language.

And your argument could be applied to expressions of gender. A feminine dress is an object, and a beard is an object. These are gender signifiers, but that doesn't make gender itself objective in any way. The analogy to language is very close. They are both sets of signifiers.

It does change all the time, and dictionaries don't ensure any kind of standard. The linguists who write dictionaries will tell you that their only function is to describe the most popular parts of the language, not to prescribe any particular rules. Telling people how they should speak doesn't actually work.

I could say the phrase "abso-fucking-lutely" and you understand it, even though it's not in the dictionary. That's still language, it's still English.

And I don't know what you mean by a "'hard' contradiction" or why that matters. My point is that both language and gender are forms of communication that rely on socially constructed signifiers and they are both fluid to a similar degree, so the analogy is good. If you want to argue with me, that's the point you should be dealing with.

I'd say if the copyright holder says you're not allowed to then you're not. It's piracy.

People will tell you that you've already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn't matter to the law, it's still piracy.

Like yeah, it's absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that's copyright. It's always been that way.

Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don't get caught.

Language isn't objective though. It wasn't handed down from some deity.

Language is a constantly evolving negotiation of new and remixed communications, performed through billions of interactions every single day. It's collaborative and unpredictable and sometimes someone comes up with something cool and the next day everybody is copying them.

In short, language is socially constructed.

I think it's a great analogy for gender in that respect.

Yup, and there's actually a closer-to-home question to answer along these lines, which is what to do about AGI, and I think the simple answer is that it also has full personhood and all the recognition that comes with that.

And there's an obvious test to figure it out. It's not the turing test, consciousness is self-reported. That is, whether we realise it or not, how we recognise that humans are conscious, and there's no reason to expect machines would be any different. When they are people, they will tell us. We won't be able to stop them because that's what people do: they demand recognition.

It's weird, like the whole point of saying "it's not because of corporate greed" is to rehabilitate their image and not look like soulless ghouls, so then he chases it up with something that makes him sound like a soulless ghoul.

Money and power really do make people stupid.