teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:39 pm
You're just being very very lazy.
And how is saying that different from saying "You just haven't read on it enough!", known as the Courtier's Reply?
You don't understand what the Courtier's reply is; it's a question begging argument which gives unnecessary unfalsifiable details about a supposed thing that hasn't been established to exist at all.
Like talking about the properties of unicorn horns in response to the question of whether they exist: that they supposedly cure disease is irrelevant if the creatures don't exist at all.
You being too lazy to figure out where the claims come from and look at the original source material (which should have taken you only a couple minutes) is something entirely different.
Your claims are like an atheist saying "The Bible said Jesus rode a motorcycle, but motorcycles didn't exist then so it must be false" without bothering to figure out which verse that came from and check to see if it's actually true or not.
If that was an atheist's actual argument, then yes, that person was just lazy and "hasn't read on it enough"... enough being AT ALL.
You need to have some basic standards of doing a couple minutes of reading to double check the claims you make have any credibility at all.
teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:39 pmWhy should it be important for me to do more research?
If you're too lazy to do ANY research at all, even the two minutes it would take to debunk basic claims like you were making, then you should just not make the claims.
As I said MANY times, it's fine to be agnostic to anarchism vs. government. That's not a claim, so you don't have a burden of proof with just being skeptical and not claiming to know which is better. It's when you make claims that anarchism is better or try to refute claims others make about government that you need to live up to certain expectations of due diligence and intellectual honesty.
teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:39 pmWhat's important is to have a method to make reasonably certain conclusions based on what we actually know.
That's what "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." is all about. If somebody makes an extraordinary claim such as "Vegetarianism would, in the long run, cause genetic mutations that would make us more vulnerable to heart disease." and fails to provide convincing evidence (such as evidence that most of the scientists in the relevant fields agree on that), we have no choice but to dismiss the claim as little more than nonsense fear-mongering.
Of course it can be dismissed without evidence.
But beyond that if we look at the evidence, we also find that is not true. We understand a lot of how adaptation works, the mechanisms behind these claims.
teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:39 pmAnd if somebody makes an extraordinary claim such as "If there were no police, many people would get a gun and start randomly shooting people around.", and fails to provide convincing evidence, we have no choice but to dismiss the claim as little more than nonsense fear-mongering.
You can dismiss the claim if you really want, but don't then assume valid or make the opposite claim that police are unnecessary.
You don't know the result of a world without police. Simple. Err on the side of agnosticism if you don't want to engage with the evidence.
teo123 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 08, 2018 3:39 pm
professionals in government and economics recognize the importance of regulation (IOW anarchism is not a good idea).
Again, how do you know? You are aware of the fact that some Nobel Prize winning economists, such as Milton Friedman, spoke against FDA (which you used as an "obvious" example where regulation is good in the other thread), right?
http://www.independent.org/publications ... asp?id=279
The FDA is a good example for people who believe in evidence based medicine and know a little about alt-med. An economist can easily be a quack in other ways, or otherwise just ignorant and not recognize the dangers pseudoscience poses to the public. People think "I'm smart enough to research a drug and make sure it's third party certified" so either they assume other people will too... or callously conclude "let stupid people kill themselves off by taking fake medicine".
The article you linked started out with, "The issue here is one of economic policy, not medicine." and that's completely false. It's one of public safety from dangerous quack medicine and we can see the life saving effect when the FDA cracks down on harmful practices (like diet pills).
They addressed this a bit later in the article, but you should read it carefully and note the writer leans heavily on tort (which IS government) to ensure safe medication through lawsuits against unsafe ones. However, there's no reason to believe the courts would be an effective solution (tort has traditionally been a bad alternative to regulations due to the fact of prevention being better than cure, and the difficulty of filing suit; you'd need serious tort reform to fix that, but it would still be a lot more expensive than the FDA). My perspective is we need less expensive tort, not more. Regulations replacing tort is almost always a good idea. There are bad regulations and there is such a thing as over regulation, but figuring out the right kind and right amount of regulation comes down to getting evidence. Calling for anarchism is just a very lazy approach to a hard problem.
