Alex > Recent Status Updates

The critique of Marxism is excellent.

"The following truths are obvious: The bodily senses perceive material objects. No bodily sense can perceive itself. The inner sense, however, perceives material objects through the bodily senses and also perceives the bodily senses themselves. And by reason all of these things, as well as reason itself, become known and are part of knowledge."

His critique of Marxism is one of the best I've read so far.

"If wage rates under capitalism are always so low that for physiological reasons they cannot drop any further without wiping out the whole class of wage earners, it is impossible to maintain the thesis of the Communist Manifesto that the laborer “sinks deeper and deeper” with the progress of industry. Like all Marx's other arguments this demonstration is contradictory and self-defeating."

I swear I just thought of a counter-argument to the Chinese Room (the conclusions people draw from if anyway) and then von Mises goes agead and brings up the same counter-argument.

"Calling an event contingent is not to deny that it is the necessary outcome of the preceding state of affairs. It means that we mortal men do not know whether or not it will happen."
That's not how the Scholastics used it. Still, good chapter on statistics.

"Now the law of large numbers and statistical compensation is operative only in fields in which there prevail large-scale regularity and homogeneity of such a character that they offset any irregularity and heterogeneity that may seem to exist on the small-scale level."

"Now these metaphysical notions of guilt, sin, and retribution are incompatible with the doctrine of determinism. If all human actions are the inevitable effect of their causes, if the individual cannot help acting in the way antecedent conditions make him act, there can no longer be any question of guilt."
Wrong, determinism does not imply lack of agency.