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[quote user=" xahrx "] I don't exist, I did not post this, therefore it's pointless asking me to remove it. I am a towel. [/quote] Hahaha... I'm well aware of the intellectual quagmire recreated whenever someone tries too hard to argue something out of existence. Outside the exact realm of mathematics, meaningful things usually
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[quote user="Neodoxy"] Okay. Do you have a deeper point? We'd like to get rid of the institutions in this world which act as monopolies on law over specific geographical areas. I could make an equally strong argument that you don't exist either, but this doesn't do much in helping us move forward. [/quote] Yeah, I know. But here's
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This sketch for an economic understanding of the use of violence as means will help us drive our point home. And the point was, I recall, that whole "The State doesn't exist" deal. So here's the thing... The State doesn't exist because it is meant to be the solution to a set of so-called problems by an entity that can neither have
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Like every other scarce resource, purposeful violence has different possible uses, and so it needs to be is economized. Which means that concrete decision takers will establish priorities and compromises so they can best employ their own supply of violence to their best advantage. But none of this is remarkable of violence as a resource. You could change
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This becomes clear once we realize this fact: purposeful violence is an economic resource. Violence is the infliction of pain and suffering upon others. And purposeful violence is violence used rationally, as a means to achieve certain ends. Or even as an end in itself, as a direct pleasure inducing activity. A number of beasts revel during acts of
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There is no State. No, I'm not talking about Somalia. And I'm not talking about medieval Iceland either. Not about some allegorical society in a popular novel, nor a cyber-punk video game scenario. This is not about some hypothetical past, some ideal future or some distant land of pure imagination. I'm talking about the realest of all worlds
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When somebody claims to have conceived a pratical strategy form a decision process in the real world that is proven to be right by "game theory", he is either exaggerating in order to convince lay people, or he is practising pseudo-science. You cannot prove stuff in the real world, only inside the logical framework of a theory. Any scientific
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The main purpose of game theory is to provide a theoretical framework whitin which some patterns of decision making can be analysed, disturbed, tested and perhaps better understood. It is an strategy for understanding human affaris and other strategical situations, such as in biology and even other situations involving automatons taking decisions.
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Scientific theories are not hammers and they are not used like hammers. Does an airplane pilot directly apply results from the theory of fluid dynamics when taking his real world decisions? No. He is trained in reading instruments and situations and taking decisions following some practical guidelines and rules of thumb. But he uses knowledge from fluid
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Unwanted consequences are not always purely random. Pure randomness is an ellusive concept. You cannot say something is purely random if rational decisions can affect the odds of the outcomes. People that frequently engage in unprotected casual sex are not subject to the same chances of parenting than people that take precautions such as contraceptive