Episode 135: Coercion and Critical Rationalism

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:02]  Peter: This week on The Theory of Anything podcast, Bruce considers the non-aggression principle, which is the notion associated with libertarianism that states it is morally wrong to initiate violence. Does it truly make sense to see all areas of law through this principle? Could it be replaced by something better? I think at one point Bruce mentioned something he calls the principle of least coercion.

[00:00:30]  Unidentified speaker: Made some sense to me.

[00:00:32]  Peter: And what precisely is coercion from a critical rationalist perspective? I, as usual, enjoyed listening to Bruce take a deep dive into these issues, and I hope someone else out there gets something out of it too.

[00:00:55]  Bruce: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast, eh, Peter?

[00:00:57]  Unidentified speaker: Hello, Bruce.

[00:00:59]  Peter: How are we doing today?

[00:01:00]  Unidentified speaker: Good.

[00:01:01]  Bruce: We've got a, Bruce reads his past blog posts episode today.

[00:01:07]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:01:08]  Bruce: And then we'll discuss them.

[00:01:10]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:01:11]  Peter: And is this blog available online, or do we have to go back to the web archives?

[00:01:16]  Bruce: You have to go back to the web archive. You know, everybody has told me I should put some of my better articles up on somewhere.

[00:01:23]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:01:24]  Bruce: I've just never really gotten around to it. You do have to understand that I only got so much available free time, and I put a lot of time into this podcast, a ridiculous amount of time into this podcast. If I wasn't doing the podcast, I might have some time to instead spend that time trying to take some of these articles and put them back up. But every time I think about doing it, it just feels overwhelming and I would rather be working on the podcast.

[00:01:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:01:53]  Peter: I don't know, how can we monetize this? Like, I keep, every once in a while I come across some YouTuber or whatever doing some kind of comedy or, I don't want to disparage what anyone else puts online, but some silly thing and it'll mention, oh yeah, this is an influencer who was a multi-millionaire or something. Couldn't we be able to at least get like a thousand bucks here together or something?

[00:02:27]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know. Just a small pie—piece of the pie is all we're asking.

[00:02:32]  Bruce: So I should mention we have eight paying supporters on Patreon at this point, and we're very grateful for them.

[00:02:39]  Peter: It's just an honor. It's not about the money. It's just such an honor that anyone would do that.

[00:02:44]  Bruce: They're the ones paying for my Twitter account so that I can have the blue checkmark and advertise the show. So I've mentioned this, but I used to make more money, and I'm a little bit older, so I'm getting close to an early retirement age. I never enjoyed my job.

[00:03:09]  Unidentified speaker: I never enjoyed my career. I made mistake early on. I'm a sole provider for my family.

[00:03:14]  Bruce: And so, it was nearly impossible for me to switch careers, because I had no backup income from my wife to fall back on or something like that. So I became super interested in Four Strands, David Deutsch's Four Strands, after reading his books and then branching out, I started reading about AI. I became super interested in the epistemology of AI and how it might tie in with critical rationalism. And I went back to school, and part of my reason was I didn't know what I was doing going back to school.

[00:03:44]  Unidentified speaker: I was working as a project manager at the time. I was not a programmer. I didn't know how to get started. I went back to school.

[00:03:50]  Bruce: I used that to convince a friend to hire me as a programmer. But like I'm not, I started way late in the career. I'm not a great programmer maybe. And I started, I've done some AI projects, which is what I really wanted to do. Not a ton yet, but I've kind of posted about some of my fun little project.

[00:04:10]  Unidentified speaker: I just recently did a patent search.

[00:04:13]  Bruce: So he needed to do a search for a patent he was trying to create. And it was going to take a whole bunch of hours. So he just paid me that same number of hours to write an AI that would do the search for him. And so I wrote an AI program that went out, found all the patents, tried to match them up, initially based on title and try to get it down to a smaller pipeline. Then it would read through them using LLM and try to match it to the one he was doing. And so I've done a few little kind of cool projects like that of AI Karl Popper is another one that I've mentioned. But in so many ways, I made a choice to start a full new career so late in life, there was just no way I could make money at it.

[00:04:55]  Unidentified speaker: And I don't think I'm ever going to make money at it.

[00:04:58]  Bruce: So because of that, I am strapped for resources. So I can't even afford, I'm not allowed to like, if I wanted to like dip into savings or something, of course, I could afford quite a few things.

[00:05:12]  Unidentified speaker: But like, that's against the family rules to do that.

[00:05:15]  Bruce: So if I'm going to like pay for a Twitter account, I either have to pay for it out of my own really meager fund money, you know, 50 bucks a month or something, for everything I ever want to do for fun.

[00:05:30]  Unidentified speaker: Or I have to have Patreon supporters that pay for it, which is what I'm currently doing.

[00:05:36]  Bruce: This mic I'm talking on was also paid for by the Patreon supporters. Anyhow, I really appreciate the fact that we've had people who have donated money to us to keep us doing this and to make it so we can afford to do it. We're pretty shoestring budget, so it doesn't take that much money to be able to afford to do it. Also, my whole book habit, when I read books and then discuss them on the podcast, they pay for those books. So anyhow, to your point though, even though this is such a niche subject, we're not likely to ever make a lot of money at it. It would be nice if we somehow knew how to make a thousand bucks a month, and then it would be a lot easier to afford to take all my blog posts and take the time to get them put out there, or pay someone in India to put them out there or something like that.

[00:06:28]  Peter: Well, it's an honor to be here with you, and I get a lot out of it myself, and I'm just so grateful and happy that there are at least eight people out there who get something out of it too. So, and your perspective is so unique and so important. And so, let's just—let's just keep doing it.

[00:06:54]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:06:55]  Bruce: Well, for these blog posts, a little context might be useful that I'm about to read. So, this happened during COVID, during mask laws, during anger over mask laws, particularly among like crit rat libertarians. And all of them were strongly against mask laws.

[00:07:14]  Unidentified speaker: They weren't merely against them.

[00:07:15]  Bruce: They thought that mask laws were inherently immoral, right? And that they felt that Popper's epistemology proved that mask laws were inherently immoral. And there was another group of crit rats at the time. I ran a discussion group at the time. It's now defunct, but called The Four Strands Discussion Group. And this was a super divisive issue in the group. In fact, we lost members over this issue. And it may have even been one of the things that ultimately killed the group. Because people had such strong feelings about it. And there were those that were in favor of mask laws and those that were against, and that they both had such strong moral feelings over it, right? And so I was trying to write a piece. Now, I'm not in favor of mask laws. Like, I was not in favor of mask laws. But I did not in any way agree with the libertarian ANCAP crit rats and their arguments that this came from Popper's epistemology, that mask laws were wrong.

[00:08:25]  Unidentified speaker: So I was trying to write a kind of in-between view.

[00:08:29]  Bruce: One that might show the flaws with the arguments of the libertarian crit rats, but at the same time, maybe accept that there was some truth to their view. And I was trying, believe it or not, I mean, I'm a little forceful here. So maybe saying I was trying to be a peacemaker is going too far. But like I was trying to take a middle, a more middle of the road view. But one that I think straightened out the epistemology, the wrong and epistemological mistakes that were being made by the ANCAP CritRats at the time. And that they were very, very, this is, in their opinion, this was Popper's epistemology.

[00:09:08]  Unidentified speaker: And I thought that was just absolutely, completely incorrect, right? Yeah.

[00:09:13]  Bruce: So there's several posts here I'm going to read. We'll discuss each one afterwards. But let me go ahead and this one's called, Is Initial Use of Force an Easy to Vary Explanation? So, libertarians claim that the foundational moral principle of libertarianism is that it is immoral to initiate force. This concept of initial use of force, sometimes called the non-aggression principle or the non-coercion principle, is often explained as the principle that the only legitimate use of force is as a defense against illegitimate force. The implication here is that illegitimate force is offensive rather than defensive. Thus, the person that initiates force is identifiably the one in the wrong, and response to that initial force is legitimate. In this post, I'm going to discuss my introduction to the libertarian concept of initial use of force and explore some of the difficulties libertarians have had agreeing with each other as to what constitutes an initial use of force. In addition, I'll explore why I believe it is that libertarians cannot agree on what constitutes initial use of force. I remember the very first libertarian I ever argued politics with.

[00:10:24]  Unidentified speaker: This was probably in the late 90s or early 2000s or something.

[00:10:30]  Bruce: I remember his name was Jeff Greenspan, very smart guy.

[00:10:33]  Unidentified speaker: He was a hardcore libertarian and he was a conspiracy theorist. He was a conspiratorian as Logan would call him.

[00:10:41]  Bruce: He was the first person to explain to me about initial use of force. The first question that came to my mind was how libertarians like him looked at reckless driving and in particular speeding laws. I still remember his interesting response.

[00:10:55]  Unidentified speaker: He insisted to me that speeding laws violated the principle of initial use of force.

[00:11:00]  Bruce: So they were immoral laws.

[00:11:01]  Unidentified speaker: He claimed that in a libertarian society, we sometimes jokingly call this Ancapistan, as the libertarian utopia, there would be no speeding laws.

[00:11:13]  Bruce: However, he imagined there would be nothing wrong with the engineers who built the roads could post suggested speeding limits based on their knowledge of the roads. If a driver decided to violate those suggestions and they later caused a collision, then the fact that they were traveling faster than the engineer recommended speeds would come up in a civil case when they got sued. When I asked what would happen if the driver had no insurance to cover damages for an accident, he said that such a person would never be allowed to ever drive again, so people would always choose to have insurance in a libertarian society. By the way, I want to point out just how coercive that is.

[00:11:50]  Unidentified speaker: But anyhow, let me continue.

[00:11:52]  Bruce: This answer shocked me because it waited for a problem rather than trying to avoid the problem in the first place. But it did seem to follow a certain ruthless internal logic. If one is against initial use of force, then how else would you deal with someone driving recklessly, but by waiting for them to actually cause damage and then sue them? However, this problem seemed to leave a number of uncomfortable questions, i.e. explanation gaps. The first problem is that one person's reckless driving is bound to be another person's acceptable risk. Amplifying this concern is the fact that rules of the road are intentionally arbitrary. There is no reason why driving on the left side of the road is better or worse than driving on the right side of the road. The point of having such a convention comes from the value of having everyone arbitrarily pick a single side and stick with it. Taking a stance that no one has the right to tell you which side of the road to drive on, and then only stopping people once they cause a crash, wouldn't make for very safe roads.

[00:12:53]  Unidentified speaker: Are speed limits any different?

[00:12:55]  Bruce: On freeways, the maximum speed a lone automobile can drive, particularly on a straightaway, without reducing safety, is quite high. A lot higher than any current speed limit in the US, anyhow. What makes driving at high speeds dangerous isn't that certain speeds are inherently more dangerous than others depending on the make and model of the automobile, of course. The danger comes from the relative difference in the speeds between vehicles. That's why we went from limits of 55 miles per hour to 90 miles per hour and hardly affected road safety. Note, many of you may not know this, but I actually lived through this era. The 55 mile per hour speed limit was not implemented as a safety measure at all. It was implemented during a gas shortage to preserve the cost of oil. So I am not sure road engineers have a technical way to come up with a quote best speed, particularly on long freeway straightaways rooted in the laws of physics or their craft. Instead, they'd likely need to pick a maximum speed based on personal experience and an understanding of human social conventions. Wouldn't that essentially be a speeding law disguised as an expert opinion? And wouldn't this all ultimately be an inferior version of what we already have? Aren't the roads safer precisely because we do have speeding laws that are enforced rather than waiting for people to cause harm and then suing them? Honestly, this introduction to the libertarian world —I put that in scare quotes because I was about to explain this isn't necessarily the libertarian world— sounded pretty awful to me.

[00:14:27]  Bruce: I suspected it went a long way towards forming an early negative opinion of the whole philosophy for me. I conjured up images of a world where anyone could choose to shoot a gun in a park for fun or drive down the wrong side of the road and you had to wait for them to kill someone before you could sue them, because you couldn't act without a quote initial use of force, which I was convinced, after my first conversation with Jeff Greenspan, required actual physical violence, because it had been presented to me in that way by him. Luckily, it turned out that my introduction to libertarianism was from a branch that was extra extreme. Many libertarians would have no concerns at all with laws against reckless driving or setting speed limits. In fact, I've met libertarians just as insistent that speeding and reckless driving laws in no way violate the idea of initial use of force. It's interesting to look at the reasoning from these other libertarians. Consider the act of firing a gun in the park for fun again. Shouldn't this act itself be defined as an initial use of force? The person doing this is certainly acting in a severely negligent way. Even if their intent really wasn't to cause people harm, perhaps they were even doing their best to make sure they weren't firing in the direction of others, the very act of them firing a gun where they are likely to cause harm to others is itself a, quote, coercive act, in that most people would rather not be around someone doing something dangerous like that.

[00:15:55]  Bruce: Once you realize that a, quote, initial use of force can include something like negligently firing a gun in a park, the idea of having speeding laws slash reckless driving laws doesn't seem problematic anymore. Reckless driving, which we then narrowly and legally define in some admittedly arbitrary way, is an initial use of force. So for the exact same reason firing a gun in a park can be so classified. Your choice to drive in a way that puts others at risk against their will is as much an act of, quote, coercion as any other, despite there being no clear physical force or even harm taking place. Another interesting difference between libertarians is over how to define initial use of force within the realm of intellectual property laws. Some libertarians believe that all intellectual property laws are immoral. By the way, Logan Chipkin at the time told me that they were immoral, so he was one that fell into that camp. Because they amount to trying to limit what people are allowed to think when no actual physical property is being exchanged. Can one truly make thoughts the basis for property? And is, quote, stealing an idea truly stealing at all? In what sense is it an initial use of force? But other libertarians strongly disagree. I've had some really strongly disagree with Logan on this. They start with a view that ideas can be owned, and that this is a perfectly natural way to think of property.

[00:17:22]  Bruce: For these libertarians, someone that plagiarizes them has initiated force against them, and they have no issue at all with the idea that this person can now be sued and have money taken from them. I would point here, if necessary, at gunpoint. It's interesting to note, however, that whether or not ideas can be property does seem to be a purely cultural idea. Throughout history, most cultures had no concept of intellectual property at all. In fact, during the biblical era, people could hardly imagine owning an idea. Instead, they gladly wrote books and claimed that someone else, presumably a famous mythical person, wrote the book, so that their idea would spread easier. This led to the whole category of writings known as pseudepigrapha, where authors would fraudulently claim that their book was written by some great mythical hero, Abraham, Moses, etc., in hopes of getting their ideas to replicate as much as possible because people thought that a great hero wrote the book. Such societies still had their secrets, of course, but the assumption was that a secret was yours to keep, not that you could sue someone for, quote, stealing it. In other words, throughout most of history, most people that lived could not conceive, could not only, sorry, most people that have lived not only couldn't conceive of owning an idea, but intentionally didn't take credit for their ideas, ascribing them to mythical people instead, as a way to encourage the spread of their own ideas. This is basically the opposite of how we see things today.

[00:18:58]  Bruce: So it's interesting that part of what determines if you perceive a, quote, initial use of force to include property laws seems to be related to a purely cultural idea that first requires laws to be made to create a new kind of property that treats ideas as if analogous to physical objects. To clearly see how strange it is to think of an intellectual property violation as a, quote, initial use of force, imagine someone violates your copyright, and you sue them, and a court decides that you must pay them for damages. Yet nothing physical was ever damaged. For that matter, presumably, the copyright violator never agreed to the copyright law in the first place. Further, he has no contract with you, so libertarians that believe in intellectual property, which I might note are fairly common, are certainly getting rather creative in their interpretation of what it constitutes an initial use of force. This then brings us to one of the main issues that exists with the libertarian concept of initial use of force. When a libertarian speak of it, they often try to leave you with the impression that they mean initial use of physical force. Consider, for example, Logan Chipkin's interview with Stephan Kinsella on Logan's podcast. This is an actual quote from The Interchange that happens between them. Stephan says, The libertarian understanding of rights, which is the non-aggression principle. The core way we state the non-aggression principle is that you can never initiate violence.

[00:20:30]  Unidentified speaker: Notice that he makes it specifically initial use of force as it equates it with physical violence.

[00:20:36]  Bruce: It's not wrong to respond with violence like defensive retaliation. We don't think it's immoral to use force to defend your rights, but we do think it's wrong to start force or initiate force. Okay, so note how Stephen doesn't here refer to it as initial use of force, but instead, at least initially, calls it initial use of violence. And Stephen is hardly the only libertarian I've come across that acts as if the libertarian concept of initial use of force and the initial use of violence are one and the same thing. But as we've seen, they aren't. In fact, they aren't even close to the same. Speeding laws against reckless driving, laws against firing guns in the park, and intellectual property laws are all examples of laws that libertarians apparently can't agree upon as to what does or doesn't constitute an initial use of force. And both sides view their side as the only reasonable interpretation of initial use of force and see it as, quote, objectively obvious. It's tempting here to then claim that maybe this is two branches of libertarianism. Perhaps one branch interprets initial use of force as specifically initial use of violence, and the other interprets it as something more like any action that may lead to harm or at least loss of property, including in this case intellectual property. However, it turns out this can't be the case. One thing that all libertarians in all schools agree upon is that contract law is paramount. But contract law requires us to interpret initial use of force as something other than initial use of violence.

[00:22:19]  Bruce: Imagine that you live in a libertarian stateless world, and someone hires you as a painter, and that a dispute takes place between you and your employer. In your view, the employer got what they paid for. But the employer insists that you didn't do the agreed upon work to their specification, and that you owe him at least $1,000 back. Now, for the sake of argument, let's say that the employer takes you to the court and the police system he's hired. So keep in mind, we're talking about this happening in Ancapistan, the Ancap utopia, so there is no overall government. A court and a police system are just people setting up a business, and you go hire them, okay?

[00:23:01]  Unidentified speaker: And you form a contract with them.

[00:23:03]  Bruce: Now, it happens that you have not hired this security company. But suddenly, they show up at your door with their warrant from their court that you haven't hired, stating that their court system found you to be guilty, and you now owe your employer $1,000. Now, bear in mind, this is a company that you have not hired that is now insisting that they have a right to forcibly enter your home and take your money, that you sincerely believe is still your money. You have no contractual obligation to them whatsoever. Now, it doesn't matter who is right or wrong here. It's possible you really do owe this money, and you are mistaken, and the money is yours. Or the court system itself might be mistaken. The key point is that contract law can never work in a world where initial use of force is equated to initial use of physical force or violence. Or else, the court and police system would be unable to take your money from you to settle this contract, and would have to wait for you to first do something violent first. So it must be the case that libertarians, all libertarians that try to equate initial use of force with initial use of violence, are simply mistaken, even in their own lights, and that no libertarians truly believe those are one and the same.

[00:24:26]  Unidentified speaker: By the way, side note here.

[00:24:28]  Bruce: You could imagine as a libertarian society where you're not allowed to enforce contracts, and that instead you just try to hurt the person's reputation. I've never come across a libertarian in favor of that, because I think all of them know it would never work. But you could make a case for doing initial use of force as initial use of violence. But I've never met a libertarian who's willing to do that. In light of the above discussion, it's interesting to see how all this applies to one of the recent libertarian political flashpoints, mask laws. In the current political environment, it seems most libertarians have come down against mask laws. This is usually justified on the grounds of said laws violating initial use of force or being, quote, coercive. Yet some libertarians have argued exactly the opposite, and here I put a link to a libertarian arguing the opposite, that choosing to not wear a mask is itself the initial use of force, because it represents a negligent act. From this point of view, choosing to not wear a mask in a pandemic is negligent behavior, similar to our example of shooting a gun in the park. And again, both sides vehemently insist it is objectively obvious that they are right and the other side is wrong. In short, it would appear that an appeal to initial use of force can be used by both sides of the mask law debate. So, is the non-coercion principle truly objective?

[00:25:50]  Unidentified speaker: Or is it just a matter of taste?

[00:25:52]  Bruce: And libertarians are simply backing into it? Or put another way, is, quote, initial use of force really just an easy to vary explanation? Libertarians certainly act as if finding an initial use of force is an objectively obvious thing, even while vehemently disagreeing with each other over where to draw the line. But as we've seen, libertarians apply or not the concept of initial use of force to such wide-ranging ideas as negligent acts, contract laws, and intellectual property. Once you realize that libertarians can't possibly mean violence or physical force when they refer to force, this raises an interesting question. Is it possible there is enough latitude in how one interprets the word force such that any law can be justified as a violation or not of initial use of force? Here would be my question to my libertarian friends. Can you name a law that currently exists in real life that you feel violates the principle of initial use of force, that I can't just as easily claim follows that principle? Given that the word force can include any form of physical violence, any form of negligence that might cause harm, any enforcement of a cultural norm that is deemed valuable, i.e. intellectual property, or any violation of a contract, I feel doubtful it is even possible for libertarians to point to an objective counter example to this principle. Certainly, mask laws do not qualify because one can easily just argue that not wearing a mask in a pandemic is negligence and therefore coercive to those that don't want to be around someone acting in that way.

[00:27:30]  Unidentified speaker: Nevertheless, I'm not sure.

[00:27:32]  Bruce: I would challenge my libertarian friends to do their best to find a good example of a law that violates this principle of initial use of force that I can't cleanly argue the opposite using the very same principle. If they can't come up with such an example, then it must be the case that this principle is an easy-to-vary explanation, and thus a bad explanation. One consistent observation I've made throughout this post is that not a single libertarian I've ever argued with has ever thought initial use of force was anything but obvious, even while vehemently disagreeing with each other. This strikes me as a classic example of how theory determines observation, not the other way around. If you are starting with the assumption that force delineates moral and immoral acts, then whatever you personally experience as undesirable will automatically be seen as force against yourself, and thus the initial use of force. This may even radically differ from situation to situation because you can't experience the other person's feelings, i.e. when your actions are experienced by the other party as coercive, you may therefore apply the principle entirely and consistently over time. It will likely always be you that just happens to always experience the initial use of force in every circumstance. Could it therefore be that Andy, an at-the-time crit rat in our discussion group that argued for mask laws, is correct that the non-aggression principle or non-corrision principle is a circular argument?

[00:29:04]  Unidentified speaker: Here's his actual argument, by the way.

[00:29:07]  Bruce: Quote, by calling on the NAP, one is just stating that, quote, I'm entitled to this, but using different words. If I have a different theory of justice, and by extension, a different theory of entitlement, then a libertarian calling on non-aggression or defense of coercion will offer no insight into which theory is correct. Borrowing from Popper to make sense of any piece of data, one must have a working theory. The piece of data alone can't tell you much, as he said, quote, all observations are theory-laden. The same goes for coercion or aggression. One needs a working theory of entitlements to decide what is coercion or aggression versus defense. Unfortunately, many libertarians do not understand that aggression is merely a way to define violence, presupposing a theory of entitlement. Instead, they think that coercion is a theory of entitlement itself, a.k.a.

[00:30:03]  Unidentified speaker: begging the question, a circular argument, in other words.

[00:30:06]  Bruce: Put another way, this is me now, is the non-aggression principle simply a fancy way of saying, you shouldn't act in ways inconsistent with libertarian political views because we feel libertarian political views are the correct ones? How does searching for an initial use of force help us answer this question? If force simply means breaking laws we feel shouldn't have been implemented? That is the end of the article. But there were a couple of comments that I thought were enlightening, so let me actually read the comments quickly. This text clarifies a lot on my own thoughts about libertarian views. For example, if we could just get rid of the state, most of our problems would be solved automatically.

[00:30:43]  Unidentified speaker: This is what he sees as a libertarian view. One solution to all problems.

[00:30:48]  Bruce: When the discussion shifts over to what it is that will replace the state and how to deal with the problems arising in this new system, libertarians tend to disagree with each other on the solutions. When you say it is caused by easy-to-vary explanations, it all makes sense to me. I think it would be more productive if libertarians didn't try to throw out a large part of western tradition, the state, all at once, but instead propose small changes to the current tradition that would move it closer to their ideal. Then we could deal with new problems that arise one at a time and course correct along the way. Here was my response.

[00:31:22]  Unidentified speaker: Thanks for commenting. I tend to think of it like this.

[00:31:24]  Bruce: Libertarians should pay more attention to Karl Popper's epistemology and how it applies to governments. They should abandon utopianism, as Popper understood that term. I realize Libertarians don't feel they are utopian, and the word utopian can have many different meanings. For example, utopian might mean perfection, and no libertarian believes their ideals will result in perfection. Thus, they see themselves as not utopian in this sense. Okay, fair enough, under that particular definition of utopian. Though I'm fairly certain that Plato didn't think his utopia would result in perfection either, so I'm not sure why I see this definition as relevant to the discussion. But Popper is specific as to what he meant by utopian. And as far as I can tell, libertarians are utopian in exactly the way Popper intended that term. Once this is understood, the rest of the ideas that uniquely defined libertarians crumble away. What you're left with is classical liberalism, which also believes in the free market, believes in minimizing government where possible, etc. That was the end of my comment.

[00:32:28]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, sorry. Go ahead, Peter. What were your thoughts on this?

[00:32:31]  Peter: Well, I think you've convincingly deconstructed this initial use of force idea. I mean, I guess I think two things, maybe contradictory things, are true. I would almost even go beyond libertarians and say, almost any political ideology you can think of, from national socialism to communism. In its essence, they are making a claim that they are using government to fight the initial use of force. I mean, they might use convoluted and incorrect logic to get there, but a Marxist is probably still gonna say that they're defending the proletariat against the bourgeoisie wanting to control them or something like that.

[00:33:30]  Bruce: In my next post that I'm gonna read, I say exactly that as an example.

[00:33:34]  Unidentified speaker: So it's interesting that you bring that up. Okay, yeah.

[00:33:36]  Peter: So I mean, that's, you know, it's a very easy to vary fuzzy concept on one hand, but on the other hand, like, I can't imagine talking about politics or law and just throwing out this concept altogether either. I mean, it seems to me a very important guidepost when talking to people about the best kind of society or government to have. I mean, I can't, I just don't know how we would get around that.

[00:34:18]  Bruce: About a discussion about coercion, like, what do you refer to?

[00:34:20]  Peter: No, about initial use of force. I mean, you have to, that's sort of the basic moral principle that, you know, is, you know, I mean, it's kind of a beautiful thing too, I guess, that it unites people across so many.

[00:34:37]  Unidentified speaker: Ideologies.

[00:34:38]  Peter: Yeah, and so that they can have, use this as a starting point for a discussion to try to come to common ground. I mean, for the mask example, I guess, that would be personally, the first time I'd ever heard of wearing these masks, my BS detector went haywire, and I've never in my life read a single thing that made me think that these masks were all that valuable. But at the same time, if this was an alternate reality where this was a different pandemic or a different, just, we had different laws of physics or something, and these masks were incredibly successful at saving lives and stopping disease, and that, you know, if you went to a grocery store and there was someone wearing, not wearing a mask, that there was a chance they were going to kill you and your parents too, then, I mean, that would be, I might be really in favor of masks in that world. So, I mean, I'm not even, I wouldn't even say you have to bring in a highfalutin moral, like, reason for being on one side or the other. So, and I think most libertarians probably, probably would be in favor of masks.

[00:36:03]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, of course, you know, there might be some extreme who would.

[00:36:06]  Bruce: Yeah, so the ones on Twitter, particularly the CritRat ones, none of them were in favor of masks, and they were staunchly against it.

[00:36:15]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, but they also don't think if they're effective either, I'll bet.

[00:36:18]  Peter: I mean, if they really thought they were effective, they probably wouldn't stick to their guns and say they were still against them. They were probably, I mean, so many of these arguments are basically an argument about facts.

[00:36:29]  Unidentified speaker: The actual science, right.

[00:36:31]  Peter: Facts, and they're using their moral intuitions to justify what they believe the facts to be. I mean, I guess it can go both ways.

[00:36:42]  Unidentified speaker: So let me say, let me say that people did raise this to the CritRat ANCAPs. Okay.

[00:36:49]  Bruce: And they claimed that even if it were true, that masks were effective, that it would not change their opinion. Now, I think what you're arguing is they don't know if it would change their opinion. And I agree that that's true, right? But like they were staunch, staunch, staunch, like really zealously ideological, that even if masks, for sure, they claim masks were not effective. But even if masks were effective, it was still immoral to have mask laws. And there was no world in which it could be conceived as moral.

[00:37:22]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:37:23]  Peter: And I have a hunch that people on the other side of the debate, it's maybe harder to understand. But there's some people that just kind of like masks or something. I don't know what it is exactly.

[00:37:36]  Unidentified speaker: It's just some they like to see.

[00:37:38]  Peter: I mean, there's people still wearing masks today. And you can kind of tell that I don't know if it's because of a real health concern. I just have a hunch that it's kind of they like the feeling of, of, of feeling like they're doing something good for the world or something.

[00:37:57]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, I don't know.

[00:37:58]  Peter: It's hard to understand the psychology there, but I...

[00:38:03]  Bruce: So, I feel like one side note. So, if we were to pick a critical rationalist, famous critical rationalist, Nicholas Taleb, maybe not the best example of critical rationalism, but a super famous critical rationalist, he was in favor of mask laws. And I don't know if he would self-identify as a libertarian, but he is like uber libertarian himself, right?

[00:38:24]  Unidentified speaker: He's a little bit hard to classify. Yeah, he's a little hard to classify. You're right.

[00:38:28]  Bruce: His argument at the time that Andy raised to like Dennis Hackethal and Aaron and the ANCAP crit-rats that he was arguing with, he had this video from Taleb he sent them. And Taleb basically said, he said, so keep in mind, we don't know much at the beginning of the pandemic.

[00:38:52]  Unidentified speaker: The science just isn't there yet, right?

[00:38:55]  Bruce: So he said, we have an explanation. We understand that at least one way that it travels is from your breath, from spittle in your mouth. And if you put something in that way, then we have an explanation that it should reduce the spread of the pandemic. Now, all sorts of things have been challenged about that since then, right? There was this idea that maybe it actually primarily spread from people passing gas.

[00:39:26]  Peter: That, I had never heard.

[00:39:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I've heard that one.

[00:39:30]  Bruce: So like if you're in a car, someone passes gas, everybody gets COVID. And then there was this idea that you maybe needed a mask that was super high grade because the particles were so small, so [burn the mask?] didn't do any good.

[00:39:44]  Peter: I mean, to be fair, there might be some truth to that. And I guess one of the reasons I think I was just my BS detector went haywire about these masks was just to be around kids, around high school students or others, and you see the way they wear these masks and they're falling down, and then you've got to eat around other people, and just at a practical level, these masks are worthless, it seems to me.

[00:40:12]  Unidentified speaker: So I think there's a fair question here though, which is, and this is the question I tried to ask David Deutsch about in episode 100, and I want to actually cover what his answer was, because I don't think his answer is bad, but I think I could give a better answer to the same question.

[00:40:27]  Bruce: The question is, what's the correct critical rationalist rational response when the science isn't in yet, and the knowledge hasn't been created yet? So Taleb's critical rationalist answer, agree or disagree, was, we have an explanation as to how this works, and we have an explanation as to what might possibly stop it, so we should implement it, and we should try it. And maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but we go with the explanation that's available to us at the time. And you bring up, it's not going to be effective for kids, yeah, but it might be effective for people in hospitals, right? So Taleb, as a critical rationalist, would have taken the other side and would have rooted it in the existence of explanations, right? Which I think most Deutschian critical rationalists could at least relate to the style, even if they can't agree with this particular argument, they can at least relate to the style of argument he was trying to use. I do feel like the science never really supported, like once we did science on this, it does seem to me that masks weren't particularly effective, unless they were like super high grade masks.

[00:41:38]  Unidentified speaker: So I actually think you're factually correct.

[00:41:42]  Bruce: My point really is more, we didn't know at the time, right?

[00:41:46]  Unidentified speaker: So what Taleb's argument doesn't strike me as a bad critical rationalist argument.

[00:41:51]  Bruce: I don't, it ultimately was wrong, right? But like at the time, we just didn't know and the explanations that were available to us, it made a certain amount of sense.

[00:42:01]  Unidentified speaker: Let me just say that much.

[00:42:02]  Bruce: And I'm saying this as someone who was not in favor of mask laws, okay? The other thing I want to bring out is in this blog post, it was an early example of me offering how to test a non-empirical theory. So I'm literally making a, making, I'm asking the question, at this point, I'm asking the question. In the next blog post, I'm going to take a stronger stance that initial use of force is in fact easy to vary. But at this point, I'm not entirely convinced one way or another, but I present a test. Offer me a law that's on the books that you feel violates NAP, that I can't just as easily claim follows NAP. And if you can give me an example of that, like I can't conceive of any, off top of my head anyhow, but like if you're on the side that you think there's a difference here, and you think this is some sort of delineating, limiting principle that we can use, you should be able to offer me an example of this, and then I should be able to look at that example and go, oh wow, you're right, this actually does separate certain kinds of good laws from bad laws. I can see that. No one, like I put this link out there, nobody responded to it.

[00:43:12]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think any of them read it.

[00:43:15]  Bruce: I intentionally sent a link to Dennis Hackethal, who I don't think read it, but he did respond and say, oh, you use easy to vary as an argument too much. And that was pretty much his whole response. And I felt like it was overlooking the degree to which I was offering a real test that I really wanted to see people try and do their best to come up with, okay, here's an example of a law that violates NAP, where I can actually tell. Of course, they thought Mascloss was such an example, but as I was just explaining, that doesn't even come close to being a good example. And I had such serious doubts at the time that it was even possible to come up with an example, precisely because I was starting to think, oh, this must be easy to vary, and that must be exactly the problem with it.

[00:44:02]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:44:04]  Bruce: And nobody took that seriously, which I think was unfortunate. But the reason why I bring this up is that it's an example of how you can test a non-empirical theory. You can actually falsify it by counter-example. And so what I was doing is I was putting out there this idea for the, as a conjecture, as a, for the sake of argument, not that I was completely sold on it yet. This idea, the initial, the Libertarian NAP, non-aggression principle is easy to vary. So we're putting out that, that as a conjecture. And then we test that conjecture. And I've suggested a way you could test it, right? That, that a person who disagreed with me could easily refute me by simply giving me an example of a law that violated the Knapp principle that I couldn't just turn around and with equal ease say, no, actually that follows the Knapp principle. And simply take a different point of view. And I still to this day have never seen anyone suggest such a law. And I seriously doubt at this point that such that I think the libertarian Knapp principle is 100% easy to vary. Also, I should probably note, I wrote this back when I was still entirely in the easy to vary is a great good criteria, easy to vary, hard to vary are good criteria camp. And I'm really not in that camp anymore. I still believe that there's something meaningful about this idea, but I actually think easy to vary is itself easy to vary. And so, this is something I'll talk about in future podcasts about how I eventually kind of lost faith with it.

[00:45:34]  Bruce: As a kind of idea or philosophical idea, I'm fine with it and I think it actually works as a kind of a partial explanation as to what ad hocness is, that Popper missed that Deutsch picked up on. But if you actually offer it as a criteria by which to determine if a theory is good or bad, I think it has a zero success rate. And I don't think it ever will have a success rate at all. I don't think it ever means anything meaningful at all, that you will always perceive your own theories as hard to vary and theories you don't like is easy to vary.

[00:46:08]  Peter: And what is your alternative to that?

[00:46:10]  Unidentified speaker: Ad hocness. Ad hocness. So you're going back to Popper. I'm going back to Popper. So let me just say this.

[00:46:17]  Bruce: I have never once, never even once, told... I've had cases like this where I can see that a crit rat is using an argument, a theory, that is easy to vary. And I even suggest how we could test it. I give it out to them.

[00:46:34]  Unidentified speaker: I say, I think that your argument is easy to vary.

[00:46:37]  Bruce: I've never once had a crit rat agree with me.

[00:46:41]  Unidentified speaker: Never, ever, ever.

[00:46:43]  Bruce: When I point out to them, your theory is ad hoc.

[00:46:47]  Unidentified speaker: They always agree with me.

[00:46:50]  Bruce: They always say, yes, so, but it's not an empirical theory, it's a philosophical metaphysical theory. So they—I just—I don't think—I think when you actually ask, is this easy to vary, no one agrees. Whereas if you say, is this ad hoc, everyone agrees because it's a really objective criteria that you can then argue over whether it applies or not to your metaphysical theory. But nobody ever says, no, it's not ad hoc, because of course you could call their bullcrap immediately because to be ad hoc means it has independently testable consequences. So it's like, okay, well, tell me what your independently testable consequence is. The conversation is done at that point, right?

[00:47:28]  Unidentified speaker: It's a way better criteria, right?

[00:47:30]  Bruce: I should be calling it criterion, but I hate that term.

[00:47:33]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm gonna say criteria.

[00:47:35]  Bruce: I'll use it for both single and plural.

[00:47:36]  Unidentified speaker: I'm a layman, I get to get to do that.

[00:47:39]  Peter: That sounds normal to me, I don't know.

[00:47:41]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:47:41]  Bruce: So ad hoc is a criteria. I think easy to vary and ad hoc are either strongly related or they might even be the exact same criteria, but one actually works as a criteria and one doesn't. And so I think you really should go with the one that works, right? That nobody has to argue over. It's not a matter of opinion, whether a theory is ad hoc or not.

[00:48:04]  Unidentified speaker: It's almost entirely a matter of opinion, whether a theory is easy to vary or not. So as a criteria, I think it's a failure. Okay.

[00:48:14]  Bruce: This next article was about Popper's view on everything that we just talked about.

[00:48:21]  Unidentified speaker: So I'm going to read this one next.

[00:48:23]  Bruce: So this is called Popper on quote coercion unquote. In my previous post, I talked about the difficulties libertarians have even just agreeing with each other over what constitutes quote initial use of force. One libertarian might see traffic laws as violating initial use of force, and another may see reckless driving as an initial use of force. But no matter where a libertarian comes down on where to draw the line, I've never even once seen them have the slightest doubt that they drew the line in the right place. And they always believe that their line is so obvious that only an immoral person would disagree. In other words, libertarians have a very consistent the truth is manifest problem. When it comes to defining initial use of force, they personally know what initial use of force looks like when they see it, and they are certain they are right and everyone else is wrong. There is no spirit of fallibilism that ever enters into the discussion. Every libertarian seems to believe they should rule when it comes to defining initial use of force, and no one else's opinion can possibly be correct. This seems to be directly related to the fact that libertarians use the concept of initial use of force in an easy to vary manner. In this post, I'm going to explain why the concept of initial use of force, or at least its current libertarian form, violates Popper's epistemology, and how the concept of coercion actually fits within Popper's epistemology.

[00:49:45]  Bruce: In addition, we'll explore how libertarians might fix these issues and improve their political philosophy by incorporating Popper's philosophy into their views. In the Four Strands email group, the now-defunct discussion group, we've discussed mask laws quite a bit. The libertarian members seem all united in the idea that mask laws are immoral because they are coercive. The non-libertarian members are split in their view. Two non-libertarian members are in favor of mask laws. I'm not in favor of mask laws and think they are generally bad ideas, although I'm not a libertarian. The libertarian argument against mask laws tends to make a single unified approach that goes like this. One, mask laws are coercive. Two, coercion violates Popper's epistemology because it's like gluing a piece of a puzzle in place, David Deutsch's analogy. It removes possible error correction. Three, libertarian politics is the only political view against all coercion. Thus, it is the only political view consistent with Popper's epistemology. Four, ergo, mask laws are immoral because they violate Popper's epistemology. Even though I'm against mask laws myself, I believe that every single one of the above statements is fundamentally incorrect. In my opinion, this argument makes the argument against mask laws seem easy to vary and weak, and moreover, it's at odds with Popper's actual epistemology. Now, of course, there are undisputed cases of first use of force. These are usually non-controversial cases that are no longer debated anymore. No one thinks killing people for fun is moral.

[00:51:28]  Bruce: As such, no one is in favor of quote initial use of force, where the concept is clear cut. If all libertarians meant by quote initial use of force were these clear-cut cases, then this would be a trivially true view that all political views agreed upon. The reason libertarians have problems agreeing on what constitutes initial use of force is because they are insistent that initial use of force always exists in every circumstance. Since their philosophy is that all evil is the initiation of force, they seek an initial use of force even in cases where it is not clear cut or even doesn't exist at all. It's interesting to note that Popper himself never claimed that his epistemology was about finding something like an initial use of coercion. And in every disagreement, in every disagreement, and then opposing it, Popper famously opposed many fundamental libertarian ideas. For example, Popper told Thomas Szasz that his libertarian views on free trade of drugs were, quote, silly. And he also advocated against unrestrained capitalism and for political interventions to protect the economically disadvantaged. This is all from Open Society, volume 2, pages 124 to 125. So why did Popper not see critical rationalism as fundamentally about finding the first use of coercion like libertarian critical rationalists do? The reason why is because Popper believed that it is common for people to simply find themselves at odds with each other because they have to live near each other and have different ideas about how to live their lives.

[00:53:12]  Bruce: Now I'm going to quote from Conjecture Refutation, page 472 here. This is Popper explaining it himself. A liberal utopia that is a state rationally designed on a traditionalist tabula rasa is an impossibility for the liberal principle demands that the limitations to the freedom of each, which are made necessary by social life, should be minimized and equalized as much as possible, Kant. But how can we apply such an a priori principle in real life? Should we prevent a pianist from practicing, or prevent his neighbor from enjoying a quiet afternoon? All such problems can be solved in practice only by appealing to existing traditions and customs and to a traditional sense of justice, to common law, as it is called in Britain, and to an impartial judge's appreciation for equity. For lack of a better term, we can call this, this is me now, for lack of a better term, we can call this phenomena simultaneous coercion, if you like. Neither side actually intended to coerce the other, and neither initiated the problem. The problem just existed because people have to live near each other, and have different ideas about how to live their lives. Now, given that this coercion is simultaneous, it must be the case that it isn't really coercion in the traditional sense at all.

[00:54:38]  Unidentified speaker: It's really just externalities.

[00:54:40]  Bruce: It's just a set of problems two or more people have that need to be solved due to the existence of each other. This is the correct critical rationalist way to look at the situation rather than by seeking, quote, who is being coercive first, since neither was being coercive first. If you are having an argument with someone over something political, then you aren't dealing with a non-controversial case. You're dealing with one of the cases where it's not obvious who initiated the coercion. This is why initial use of force or finding who committed the coercion first is not often helpful and will likely instead result in blinding yourself to your own coercive behavior via the truth is manifest error and anti-fallibilism. This explains why libertarians are always so certain they have found the correct place to draw the line on what counts as initial use of force, even while never agreeing with even each other and other libertarians. This is a case of every observation being theory-laden. If you have wrongly based your political view around the idea that initial use of force is the correct moral way to solve every problem, you will now find an initial use of force even if there isn't one. And it will nearly always be a self-serving observation biased to whatever you happen to experience as coercion first. It would be very difficult for you to see how your own actions might be experienced by others as coercion.

[00:56:06]  Unidentified speaker: Consider the idea of mask laws.

[00:56:08]  Bruce: Suppose you don't want to wear a mask. A law that says you must, or faced a fine or jail time or whatever, feels like a form of coercion to you. So if you are a libertarian that is against mask laws, you will naturally feel like those that are in favor of mask laws are the ones being coercive first. You've now found your first use of force, ergo, mask laws are immoral. But suppose you're a libertarian that is in favor of mask laws. You don't want to be subjected to the risk of contagion during a pandemic by people acting negligently. So to you, the feelings of coercion start with the idiot walking around without a mask during a dangerous pandemic and thereby creating an unnecessary risk of harm. You've now found your initial use of force, ergo, mask laws are moral because it's the other guy that acted negligently and you're just responding to their initial use of force. But in reality, there is no pure coercion in either case, just two people with opposing problems and no currently known solution. The search for coercion was false, misleading, and only made things worse because now you are both so certain you are morally correct and can't even see that your own behavior is also coercive, i.e.

[00:57:25]  Unidentified speaker: simultaneously coercive.

[00:57:28]  Bruce: This is also why libertarians are not the only political view that is against coercion. They are merely committed to putting their opinions into the language of coercion. But in reality, every political side is arguing that their views are correct because someone else did something immoral that is coercive first. This is true of even extreme examples. Communists sincerely believe that the coercion started with the bourgeoisie taking advantage of the proletariat. Leftists sincerely believe that the coercion started with a white supremacist system that was meant to put down people of color and take advantage of them, never mind if these are correct or not. The key point is how easy to vary the language of coercion actually is. If all that matters is putting your claim into language, as libertarians do, into such language as libertarians do, it would be trivial to take every single political discussion today and just make cosmetic changes to their arguments, and suddenly all sides will be arguing over, quote, initial use of force, and not a thing will be resolved. The proper Popper-Deutsch way to look at disagreement like this is to ask, are there any laws of physics that forbid us from coming up with a solution that both allow us to not wear masks and remove all chance of catching the virus?

[00:58:52]  Unidentified speaker: Clearly there is nothing in the laws of physics forbidding such a solution.

[00:58:56]  Bruce: Finding a vaccine for the virus is such a solution.

[00:58:59]  Unidentified speaker: This is before the vaccine existed, by the way.

[00:59:02]  Bruce: If your solution does not solve both problems at the same time, then insisting on your solution and only your solution is coercive, and you are merely advocating for crypto-coercion, rather than against coercion. To understand feelings of being coerced, we can define the term using a word nominalist approach like this, coercion. Coercion is the word that we use to describe the feelings we have when the mere existence of someone else with a different idea than me acts in a way that impacts me in ways that I do not enjoy. Basically, I'm accepting that the mere feeling of coercion is what coercion means. The Libertarians on Four Strands have argued to me that this definition isn't useful because it defines coercion so loosely as apply to anyone.

[00:59:53]  Unidentified speaker: They've misunderstood. This is the whole point of the word nominalist definition.

[00:59:59]  Bruce: Hanging special legal meaning on a word is word essentialism and is at odds with Popper's epistemology. The very fact that you're seeking to define coercion in some deep, precise way was the first sign that you were off the rails in terms of Popper's epistemology. This was, by the way, in reference to Dennis Hackethal offering what an older TCS definition of coercion and then tried to use it to prove that mask laws were immoral. And I was trying to argue that was the wrong approach altogether. Popper points out that you should be able to express yourself without needing to precisely define your terms. Allow me to demonstrate that Popper was right by laying out the proper understanding of how to deal with coercion using Popper's epistemology using no specially defined terms. Suppose you and someone else have a disagreement. Let's say one of you is in favor of mask laws and one of you is against mask laws. How should you go about resolving things? Number one, can you convince one side that they are wrong? For example, maybe you do studies and you find evidence that the pandemic is not all that dangerous. So those that are in favor of mask laws stop feeling like you are not wearing a mask is negligent behavior. This would resolve the problem for both sides. Number two, if you can't convince one side that they are wrong, can you creatively come up with a solution that fully satisfies—that I say fully satisfies, but I really mean partially, or sorry, I did mean fully satisfies—that fully satisfies both parties? As previously stated, a vaccination is one such solution.

[01:01:29]  Bruce: This is before I realized that vaccinations weren't going to fully satisfy the other side. There may be others we haven't yet thought of. Obviously, solutions like this require creativity and the creation of new knowledge. If you can't come up with a solution that fully satisfies both parties, can you come up with a solution that both parties can live with? Here is an example. What if we don't make mask laws in areas where the pandemic isn't yet out of control, but instead ask people to voluntarily wear masks? But we make it clear that we'll implement mask laws should this measure prove insufficient to avoid an overrun of the medical system. Note, Utah tried this at first, and that was actually where I got the idea. This solution isn't ideal for either side, but both sides might find it better than the other alternatives being offered. They may at least find this solution tolerable. Finally, if you are unable to come up with a creative solution that satisfies both parties, then it is necessary to implement a solution that one or both parties will find coercive. So, pick the least coercive of the available solutions. Solutions 1 and 2 that I just mentioned are both always by definition perceived by all parties as non-coercive. Solution 3 is perceived as coercive but tolerable. It's the best we know how to do at the moment, but we know we can do better with the right kind of knowledge. As such, both sides should still seek a better solution, in this case, discovering a vaccine, rather than stopping at solution 3.

[01:03:00]  Unidentified speaker: But here is the interesting point.

[01:03:02]  Bruce: If you're having a political debate with someone, that implies there is no agreed upon solution. So that means the realm of political debate happens to exist at solution level number 4. That is why political debate is so contentious, because what we're really discussing is who gets to course whom and by how much.

[01:03:26]  Unidentified speaker: Political discussion lives at solution level 4.

[01:03:30]  Bruce: The very fact that you're having the debate means that we have yet to creatively find a non-coercive solution that will satisfy everyone's feelings of being coerced. So the correct critical rational's replacement for easy to vary concept of initial use of force in all cases, is instead the principle of least coercion. In principle, we all agree that if you are at level 4, because there is no known coercive solution, then seeking the least coercive solution is the right choice. What we're not likely to agree upon is which solution is the least coercive. This is really just a restatement of Popperian fallibilism. The whole point of the debate is to find the least coercive solution. That we are debating it means we don't agree upon it. The debate exists to help us criticize proposed solutions and force improvement and to force improvements to proposed solutions. With some luck, we'll discover a tolerable solution. Solution level number three. But even that may not happen. And in that case, even not acting is a type of coercive action. So we simply have no non-coercive solutions available to us yet. Put bluntly, libertarians believe in the truth as manifest error. They wish to avoid political debate by simply finding who obviously initiated force.

[01:04:53]  Unidentified speaker: Conveniently, it's always the other guy.

[01:04:56]  Bruce: But the reality is that it's not obvious who initiated force, or even that anyone initiated force. That's why the political debate is warranted. The principle of least coercion is the correct Popperian view of coercion. Coercion is not by itself anti-Popperian epistemology, if all the other alternatives are more coercive. In fact, it's a sign that we have yet to create the knowledge needed to make everyone satisfied. And given such a lack of knowledge, the correct answer is to try the best idea we can come up with and see what happens, then learn from it the idea of roughly testable theories. The traditions and legal codes of the open society help us determine what things to try first, but those traditions may be mistaken for this particular crisis, and we may have to try something else. But the need to act and learn is paramount in an open society, and that is why I'm against mask laws, but I accept that society has every right to implement mask laws. We should not upfront outlaw possible solutions to novel problems using easy-to-vary arguments like initial use of force. Put plainly, trying to outlaw mask laws, or not trying out mask laws, or not trying them out, does not violate Popperian epistemology in and of itself. Any action to solve problems is better than not solving problems. This is why the glued puzzle piece analogy is incorrect for this case. To gain knowledge, a Popperian open society has no choice but to take coercive actions from the point of view of those that disagree with the action.

[01:06:39]  Bruce: The key thing that makes it Popperian is that it can change bloodlessly and something else can be tried later. This is exactly the opposite of gluing a puzzle piece down. This is why Popper has no issue at all advocating for laws that to libertarians seem coercive. So does all this mean that Popper would have been in favor of mask laws?

[01:07:01]  Unidentified speaker: Not even slightly.

[01:07:02]  Bruce: The realization that both sides are being coercive doesn't mean both sides are being equally coercive or that one side is more coercive than the other.

[01:07:11]  Unidentified speaker: Let's put this another way. Let's say you are against mask laws.

[01:07:15]  Bruce: So you make the following argument. Quote, mask laws are wrong because they are coercive while allowing people to not wear masks around those that don't want to get sick are not coercive. Compare this to the following argument. Mask laws are more coercive than forcing people to get sick due to people not wearing mask laws. Neither argument strikes me as particularly good. But at least the second one has the benefit of not being known to be false. Additionally, the second one doesn't fool you into thinking it's a better argument than it is. This means you will be more capable now of improving your explanations. Some of the following might even be better. Perhaps, here were some suggestions that came off the top of my head.

[01:07:55]  Unidentified speaker: Remember, this is the height of COVID.

[01:07:57]  Bruce: We don't know the right solutions. So these may not be great solutions, but I'm just trying to show that it was possible to think of alternatives. We made so many draconian measures upfront that now we can't use them when it really matters. This would be an example of a argument that would make sense to me from a Popperian standpoint that would be against mask laws. That would be so much better than the ones that the crit-mat and caps were using at the time.

[01:08:22]  Unidentified speaker: Or this one.

[01:08:23]  Bruce: In some countries, mask laws and lockdowns have led to everyone needing to scan in everywhere and everywhere they go, giving the government all one's real-time location data. The loss of privacy and increased government control isn't worth the cost. Again, that's a much better argument.

[01:08:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:08:40]  Bruce: Do mask laws really work and would it actually be more effective to make them voluntary?

[01:08:46]  Unidentified speaker: Much better argument.

[01:08:48]  Bruce: Do we better serve the public by mandating anti-pandemic standards for every business owner or by letting each business creatively come up with their own voluntary measures and then take the consequences if they become a COVID hotbed? Might that not drive better innovation? In other words, you can only actually make progress by getting two good hard-to-vary explanations that even someone in favor of mask laws and lockdowns might see have merit. These are the right kinds of Popperian style arguments for libertarians to be making. Merely calling mask laws wrong due to being coercive is both easily shown to be wrong and also a bad argument not likely to persuade anybody. Are you interested in making actual progress or not? In conclusion, I have explained that Popper's epistemology, when applied to open societies, is not correctly implemented as a witch hunt for initial use of force, but as an open-ended search for solving each other's problems. Mask laws are one possible approach to solving problems. I suspect a bad one, though I might be wrong. Convincing people via persuasion is another possible approach. Due to the pandemic, there was and still is insufficient knowledge to understand how to best act. So there was no choice but to pick a course of action and try it, even though some people will inevitably find that solution undesirable and thus for them coercive. And they are not wrong. Coercion is often merely a subjective feeling people feel. And when the fact that they have to live with others forces them to do things they prefer not to do.

[01:10:26]  Bruce: And we should take their feelings seriously. We should try to come up with the solution, with the most creative problem-solving solution we can, until, if possible, everyone is satisfied with the solution, at which point no one will feel coerced anymore. This is what it means to live in a knowledge-creating open society, and it is the only true means of removing coercion from society. Removing coercion requires knowledge creation. What we should not do is let ourselves become blind to other people's legitimate problems. Deciding that mask laws are immoral on the grounds that they are coercive, or deciding that they are not coercive for the very same reasons, both are cases of one side becoming blind to the reality of how their own preferred solution impacts other people, in other words, is coercive to other people. As Jonathan Haidt would say, morality blinds and binds. The only true non-coercive solutions are the ones that satisfy everyone. Absent the necessary knowledge to do that, we are only left with coercive solutions. Popper's epistemology says we should not hesitate to use coercive solutions, so long as all the known alternatives are more coercive. So we should pick the least coercive solution available to us, though we might not always agree what those are. Even then, we should never be satisfied with them until we find an entirely non-coercive solution, which is just a fancy way of saying we keep seeking solutions that resolve all sides' concerns.

[01:11:55]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, that was the end of that post.

[01:11:57]  Bruce: Thoughts on that before we move on?

[01:11:59]  Peter: Well, another good one, Bruce. It does seem to me, I kept thinking how people say that everything in life, not everything, but most things that, if it's a true moral dilemma, it can be distilled into this trolley problem thing where you're arguing about deontological versus utilitarian ethics. You know, the rule-based ethics versus just the outcome-based ethics. It seems like in a way, a lot of these, so much of these discussions, maybe, I don't know about all, but so many discussions can be distilled into a, who are you going to coerce kind of argument? You know, it's like, do you have got to, you're arguing about who, I mean, if it's a true debate amongst reasonably well-intentioned people, you know, are you going to debate the per, are you going to coerce the person going to the grocery store to wear a mask or are you going to, you know, there's always, it is an interesting way to look at so many political or ethical debates.

[01:13:18]  Bruce: So here's the main thing that I want people to get out of that post I just read.

[01:13:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:13:24]  Bruce: That the problem of coercion is not easy and it takes time and effort and knowledge creation to solve the problem of coercion. If your point of view isn't that, you are being coercive, okay? If you're taking the stance, no, my version is the uncoercive one and yours is the coercive one. You have totally misunderstood the concept of coercion. And really you're just using it to [easily, barely just?] justify your own viewpoint, okay?

[01:13:52]  Unidentified speaker: You really do have to understand.

[01:13:55]  Bruce: So I was using vaccines as the example. I still think vaccines are a really good example here. I did not anticipate the degree to which Libertarians and many CritRat ANCAPs in the Four Strands group would find vaccines themselves to be coercive later on.

[01:14:10]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, and we'll start to argue against them.

[01:14:12]  Bruce: Or at least argue against laws that you had. It wasn't—there was no, a law that you have to take a vaccine, that would be relatively coercive. But in America, I don't think there was ever any laws you had to take a vaccine. But there were, like there were cases where businesses were allowed to say, we'll only let you work here if you take a vaccine.

[01:14:33]  Peter: Or people were fired from all kinds of jobs.

[01:14:35]  Bruce: Right, and like Brett Hall was just coming out making statements about how coercive that was and how immoral that was. Like he took that, even though that was a personal, your personal business, you know, I mean, it's a weird point of view that someone who supposedly thinks that contract law should be paramount was arguing that there was something wrong with a business deciding that, right? Because it seems like he should have been on the other side, given his viewpoint, but he was making posts at the time that were strongly saying, no, that's wrong, that's immoral, you're being coercive when you do that, et cetera.

[01:15:08]  Unidentified speaker: Which is another example of how easily to vary coercion is as a concept.

[01:15:13]  Peter: I got the feeling from what I remember that David Deutsch was quite pro-vaccine.

[01:15:18]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, he was. Yeah, I mean, he... Yeah. I don't know if there's...

[01:15:23]  Bruce: So the vaccine's a good example, though. That we were at the time arguing mask laws are coercive. No, not wearing a mask is coercive. And both sides just sincerely thought that the other side was just morally stupid, right? When really both were being coercive.

[01:15:42]  Unidentified speaker: And they should have recognized that fact, right?

[01:15:44]  Bruce: That the real non-coercive solution was that you invent a vaccine, but that requires knowledge creation, time, resources, okay? You have to actually create the knowledge to create a non-coercive solution. So both of their solutions were coercive. The thing that was always so hard is the CritRat and Caps. Really, it was a problem with both sides, but the CritRat and Caps were very vocal about this. They could not even conceive that their side was coercive, right? And the other side, they at least, because they weren't committed to the language of non-coercion, they would often admit, yeah, you're right, I'm being coercive. Okay, so what?

[01:16:22]  Unidentified speaker: That's still the right answer.

[01:16:24]  Bruce: And then the CritRat and Caps would respond and say, see, you admit, you're coercive. And they never saw that they were being coercive too, right? Just as much so, easily just as much so, okay? And I really sort of agreed with them. Like, I think Utah really did a fairly good job. You didn't have to wear masks outside. You only had to wear masks indoors.

[01:16:51]  Unidentified speaker: It was initially voluntary.

[01:16:52]  Bruce: I think it later laid in the pandemic when it did get severe. They did make it that inside you had to wear it. I would go for walks. I mean, everybody was working from home anyhow.

[01:17:01]  Unidentified speaker: So I would go for walks. I never wore a mask.

[01:17:03]  Bruce: I almost never wore a mask, except to go to the doctor's office or something during the entire pandemic. So I feel like the solution that Utah came up with was a fairly effective example of the principle of least coercion. And they did kind of say, we're going to try just making it voluntary. We're asking you to wear masks. We're not making it a law. And we're going to change that if it doesn't work, right? It's still a coercive solution, but it's less coercive than California, which was draconian over it, right? Which was one of the main problems that the, like some of these ANCAP crit rats lived in some of these states where it was way more draconian. And I think that they were to some degree reacting against those states laws. So anyhow, now I do have a couple other really short posts I want to read that seem relevant, that I'm never going to fit anywhere else. So I'm going to just include them here as part of the discussion. So epilogue, here is a quote from Karl Popper in Reflections on the Theory and Practice of the Democratic State. And I'm including this quote to make it clear that Popper was nothing like a crit rat ANCAP and had very strong opinion against their views. And the reason why I feel like this has to come out is because there is this constant crit rat ANCAP claim, false claim, that if you believe in Popper's epistemology, you will be an ANCAP, because it's the only best, only way that it's consistent with Popper's epistemology. And it just so is wrong. So I want to read this, because it makes it so clear.

[01:18:35]  Bruce: We need freedom to prevent the state from abusing its power, and we need the state to prevent the abuse of freedom. Clearly, this is a problem that can never be solved by laws in the abstract. A constitutional court is necessary and goodwill more than anything else. We must accept that it is a problem which can never be definitively solved. Or to be more precise, which can be completely solved only in a dictatorship, which with its principle of the all-powerful state, that we should reject on moral grounds. We should be content with partial solutions and compromises. We must not allow our love of freedom to blind us to the problems of its abuse. Okay, no way you will ever reconcile Popper's views with the currently popular CritRat ANCAP view. Okay, now, I mentioned in this this TCS definition of coercion. Here was the blog post on that, that I wrote and sent it to Dennis Hackethal because I disagreed with his use of it. And he did give me a few little responses, not much, but here is the post I actually wrote, very short. I've seen people criticize my word nominalist definition of coercion from the previous post and suggest the TCS definition of coercion as the correct one. The TCS definition of coercion is as follows. Before I give that definition, Sarah, the founder of TCS, told me, no, that's the old definition. Do not claim it's the TCS definition. But Dennis was calling it that, so I was calling it that. Okay, but I do want to recognize it wasn't the current TCS definition of coercion. Okay, but here was the definition at the time.

[01:20:19]  Bruce: By coercion, we mean, one, the psychological state of enacting one idea or impulse while a conflicting impulse is still active in one's mind. This leads to some subsidiary meanings. Two, the action of intentionally or recklessly placing someone in a state of enacting one theory while rival theory is still active in the person's mind. Three, behavior that is intended or likely to do this. Compare this definition to mine, which was, coercion is the word that we use to describe the feelings that we have when the mere existence of someone else with a different idea than me acts in a way that impacts me in ways I do not enjoy. But I conjecture that these two definitions are functionally one and the same. That conjecture is equivalent to a universal statement saying, there are no cases where the TCS definition of coercion identifies a situation as coercive, that my definition doesn't also make the same identification and vice versa. Again, notice how I am proposing a test of my theory.

[01:21:22]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:21:24]  Bruce: This is the proper critical rationalist approach. I'm surprised that no one agrees with me on this.

[01:21:30]  Unidentified speaker: Let me continue though.

[01:21:33]  Bruce: Now this has been phrased as a universal statement. This makes my claim testable in the Popperian sense because it is now refutable. My claim that the two definitions are identical can be easily refuted by simply showing me an example where one of the two definitions identifies a coercive situation that the other doesn't. If you can't find such an example, then my conjecture is the best explanation available to you, and it's rational for you to adopt it, and a failure to adopt it is irrational. Let's try this out quickly. I had Dennis Hackethal point out to me that my definition of coercion would mean that if I don't like you and want you to leave my presence while in a public place where you have a legal right to be there, and you refuse to leave, that you are being coercive to me. And I agree, my definition does imply that, but so does his TCS definition. After all, no matter what reason for wanting to leave, for your reason is for wanting me to leave, perhaps you make me feel uncomfortable. If you refuse to do so, you one, place me into a psychological state where the enacting of your idea, you refuse to leave the public place, is two, creating a conflicting impulse in my mind. I want you to leave and you won't, and it's still active in my mind. So your refusal to leave when I want you to, even though you have a right to be there, is a case of you being coercive to me in the TCS sense. I challenge those that think these two definitions are different to try to give even a single counter-example.

[01:23:10]  Bruce: Does the fact that TCS definition of coercion that it's subjective have consequences to libertarian political theory?

[01:23:17]  Unidentified speaker: Probably not. Let me explain why.

[01:23:19]  Bruce: Libertarians, Dennis being an exception, do not try to define coercion the way TCS does in general. The libertarian version of coercion seems to map to whether or not someone has entered into a contract. For example, when I have asked libertarians in the past if a boss yelling at an employee or threatening to fire them for not doing what they were asked was coercive, I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no coercion there because the employee freely entered into a contract to be employed and can leave at any time they wish. Yet, this example clearly violates the TCS definition of coercion because the employee will now be placed into a state of enacting one theory, i.e. the bosses, while a rival theory, i.e. the employees, is still active in the person's mind unless he's prepared to go search for a new job. So this example, which he may not be willing to do, may not want to do. So this example is not coercion in the libertarian sense, but it is coercion in the TCS sense. Since we now have an example of where the two of the two draw differing conclusions, we now know that they must be defining coercion differently. So the libertarian version of coercion is a different understanding of coercion than the TCS version because it attempts unsuccessfully, as per the previous articles, to bring about a more objective definition of what legally counts as coercion. That is a higher bar than merely feeling like you were pressuring into something you didn't agree with.

[01:24:56]  Bruce: One of the things in the footnotes that I point out, as I say, under my and the TCS definition of coercion, we are actually both being coercive to each other. This is an example of what I've called simultaneous coercion. People often feel coerced because someone wants to live their life differently than they want to. In this case, I don't want to see you when I'm in a public place and you want to be in that public place. We both have different operating ideas about how we want to live out our life that conflict. However, it is not the case that these two ideas are equally coercive. As Popper explained, we have to rely on our traditions to figure out which of these two conflicting desires should count as being more coercive than the other. It's tempting here to suggest that me wanting you to leave a place that you have a right to be in makes my desire more coercive than yours. But that may not be the case. For example, perhaps you have a history of harassing me and I have a restraining order on you. A court has now determined that while you have a right to be in that public place, you don't if I'm there. It is impossible to resolve which desire is the least coercive without a full account of why we feel that way the way we do and our past history leading up to that point. This can't be decided by making one size fits all rules. The specifics of the situation must be taken into consideration to determine who is being the least coercive given the circumstance. I got some question on what I meant by subjective.

[01:26:31]  Bruce: I'm using it in the common scientific usage to refer to anything related to subjective experience, i.e.

[01:26:37]  Unidentified speaker: qualia, feelings.

[01:26:39]  Bruce: I'm saying quite literally that TCS defines coercion as anything that makes the child feel coerced is to be considered coercion. Look over the definition carefully and you'll see that that is the case. Even just trying too hard to persuade a child to the point where they feel pressured is considered coercion under the TCS definition.

[01:26:58]  Unidentified speaker: This isn't a criticism of the TCS definition.

[01:27:01]  Bruce: If I understand correctly, TCS is about caring about subjective feelings in a child. So this is probably by design that they chose to define coercion subjectively in this way. Okay, that was the end of that footnote.

[01:27:15]  Unidentified speaker: Comments on this one?

[01:27:16]  Bruce: I got one more before we're done, one more short one before we're done. But the reason why I'm including this one is because I felt it was necessary to address this ANCAP CritRat idea that you could use this TCS definition of coercion, and you could use it to prove mask laws were immoral.

[01:27:35]  Unidentified speaker: You can't.

[01:27:36]  Bruce: It is completely unhelpful, and probably by design, it was completely unhelpful.

[01:27:44]  Peter: Are they defining coercion almost like a psychological state?

[01:27:49]  Unidentified speaker: That's the way I read it. I read it. I think that makes sense.

[01:27:53]  Bruce: If you believe in TCS, where you don't coerce your child, you're trying to care about the feelings of the child, then it should be defined as a psychological state, right? That would make sense, but you would never want to make laws that way.

[01:28:09]  Unidentified speaker: It's a total misfit.

[01:28:11]  Bruce: Dennis' attempt to use that definition was a complete misunderstanding of its purpose, in my opinion.

[01:28:16]  Unidentified speaker: I may be wrong.

[01:28:17]  Bruce: Sarah maybe will listen to this podcast and say, no, actually, I intended it to not be a psychological state. If so, then I think that definition failed.

[01:28:25]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe that's why she moved on to a different definition.

[01:28:29]  Peter: Did you go over what the new definition is?

[01:28:32]  Bruce: She gave it to me and I don't remember it off the top of my head. I have to say, I don't recall it being all that different.

[01:28:39]  Unidentified speaker: She really cared about the differences.

[01:28:42]  Bruce: To her, they were meaningful, but to me, they really weren't. I'm not a TCSer. Perhaps if I was a TCSer, it would have made more sense to me why she was making such a big deal about the differences.

[01:28:55]  Unidentified speaker: But it was lost on me, to be perfectly honest.

[01:28:58]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:28:59]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:29:01]  Bruce: I mentioned Popper and Thomas Szasz. I guess it's the way you pronounce it.

[01:29:07]  Unidentified speaker: Szasz? I don't know. That's how I say it. It's spelled S-Z-A-S-Z.

[01:29:12]  Bruce: He's really popular in certain Popperian circles. Brett Hall really liked him.

[01:29:21]  Unidentified speaker: This was a few years ago, so who knows? Maybe he's changed his mind. I don't think so though.

[01:29:26]  Bruce: And he talked to me on Twitter about how Szasz was just like Popper, that you needed to go read him, that his views uprooted everything you thought you knew, that yes, you have this initial negative reaction to him, but he's making this really clear point. Now, Szasz, I'm going to call it Szasz.

[01:29:52]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if that's the right pronunciation or not. I'm looking it up.

[01:29:56]  Bruce: Yeah, I did look it up, and it sounded like Szasz to me, like I did one of the audio ones, but it just isn't spelled that way. So I don't know.

[01:30:05]  Peter: Oh yeah, rhymes with boss, sauce.

[01:30:08]  Unidentified speaker: Sauce. Okay, we'll call it sauce. Okay. That's what it says here. Okay. So let's do sauce.

[01:30:14]  Bruce: So Szasz, if you don't know, Szasz is really pretty extreme. And he has many views that I think I could see why Popperians, and Popper himself was a good friend of Szasz. So it's maybe not that surprising that he's popular in Popperian circles.

[01:30:32]  Unidentified speaker: He was, Popper really did like the guy, right?

[01:30:37]  Bruce: And there was many things that Szasz said that Popper would have agreed with. But Szasz was a radical. He believed that there was no such thing as mental illness. And that he very strongly, one of the main things that he argued was that even just calling it mental illness is wrong, because that's a terrible analogy. An illness like you can catch it, it has germs and it jumps to you, and mental illnesses are nothing like that. Like he had this series of arguments that he would use about why you should not call it mental illness, which of course is really just word essentialism, because we're now arguing over terms.

[01:31:18]  Unidentified speaker: That's what I was about to say.

[01:31:19]  Bruce: And then he also argued that the vast majority of what we call mental illness is nothing like that. It's just people making decisions about their lives, and that when we outlaw mental illness, there's like a hidden legitimate concern here. We take this person and we throw them into an institution because they're mentally ill, that we're now taking away this person's right to choose, and we're allowing the state to do this. That's an immoral thing for us to do. He argued, of course, that drugs should be entirely legal because the government has no business telling a man what he puts in his body. I mean, there's a number of fairly radical libertarian arguments. So it's not surprising that a libertarian, ancap, crit rat like Brett Hall would love Szasz.

[01:32:04]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:32:05]  Bruce: And I think Szasz also fits really well with Brett's views, possibly Deutsch's views, on Universal Explainers. Now, I've argued that their view here is wrong, that Universal Explainers can be strongly, explainership can be strongly impacted by genetics, by whether your mind's working well, things like that. But since they have this idea that Brett Hall's Theory of Intelligence is that everyone's equally intelligent, that there's no real difference between Universal Explainers, that's what makes us universal, that genes, they might have a minor influence, but you overcome it very easily. Like Szasz's view just really fits well with Brett's views, right? So it doesn't surprise me Brett liked him so much and saw him as a towering figure similar to Popper, right?

[01:32:52]  Unidentified speaker: Now, it's interesting.

[01:32:53]  Bruce: And the reason why, after having this conversation with Brett, I came across Popper's actual letter to Szasz and what he said to Szasz himself. I'm going to read that because I think it's so enlightening. So he said, Popper said to Szasz, I can't support you publicly.

[01:33:13]  Unidentified speaker: I like your books.

[01:33:14]  Bruce: I like a lot of what you're saying. I cannot come out in support of you publicly because I have two objections, one practical and one theoretical. Here's the actual quote now from Popper. The practical point is free trade in drugs. At the risk of hurting you, this is just silly. Principles cannot be taken to their limit. Do you wish free trade in hydrogen bombs and cobalt bombs? I'm definitely against free trade in shotguns, even pistols. Even if I could be persuaded, I might be by your argument that it is, quote, none of the government's business what drug a man puts into his body. It is precisely the main business of government that he put what he puts into another person's body. A dangerous drug, a bullet, an electric shock. That is the practical point. The theoretical point is the non-existence of mental illness. Here, my difficulty is, is that I know very little about the subject, and you know a lot. I think you are 95% right. A third point is the danger of this problem, degenerating into a quarrel about words or definitions. But I believe that if a man is heavily drunk, he does lose, as common sense puts it, control of himself. No doubt, there are many other drugs that have similar effects, including drugs produced by our own body when it is ill. I am in my 83rd year and my memory is getting bad. A mental illness, in my opinion. But let's not quarrel about words. My mind shows symptoms likely due to aging. The aging of the body presumably analogous to the pains in my joints.

[01:34:56]  Bruce: This is the kind of thing that I and most people would call a mental illness on a physical basis. And I am not prepared to quarrel about words or definitions. I am very ready to believe you when you say that most alleged mental illnesses are not real. That most or all neurotics are not really ill, but undisciplined. But my, unfortunately, not yet catastrophic loss of memory is not merely a loss of mental discipline. And it seems to me that it has a physical basis as perhaps Parkinson's disease seems to have. That was the end of Popper's letter.

[01:35:32]  Peter: Well, I really liked Popper's response personally. I think two things can be true at once, which I feel like Popper is kind of agreeing with maybe, is that A, the entire psychological, the industry and philosophy behind psychology is just wrong. It's vacuous. It's just based on incorrect assumptions about what humans are. I mean, that really resonates with me. And B, the basic concept of mental illness does have some validity, too. Like, I can't completely... I mean, I did read his book, and I've seen his lectures and stuff. And, you know, I really want to agree with him, honestly, on everything. But he just goes a little too extreme for me. Like, what Popper says, he says 95 percent. Okay, I'll agree with that, I guess. But I just can't convince myself that there's no such thing as mental illness. I've just had too many, too much real life experience suggests otherwise.

[01:36:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think this...

[01:36:56]  Bruce: So Popper's response to Szasz, he really makes two points to him. One is that his key argument, he makes... Szasz has two key arguments that Popper can't agree with. One is arguing over what the term mental illness, or what we call mental illness. That's really kind of a vacuous argument. There's something real, we call it mental illness. Whether that's a great analogy or not, does not matter. That's what the word means, right? Okay, so that's the first problem. So Popper kind of dismisses that as, look, you're just arguing definitions, it doesn't matter. And then there's kind of the more substantive point that Szasz makes, which is that there's physically no such thing as mental illness. That's easily refuted by counter-example.

[01:37:45]  Unidentified speaker: We know it's wrong. It's a refuted theory, right?

[01:37:47]  Peter: And he also might say it's disempowering to the individual.

[01:37:51]  Unidentified speaker: It makes you feel like you have something that you have no control over. Which might be true. Which is, yeah, there's a lot of truth there.

[01:37:58]  Peter: I mean, I like the general argument, but...

[01:38:02]  Bruce: So, I do think, so it's interesting, Michael Goldberg, sorry, Michael Golding, who's a crit rat, who's friends with David Deutsch, but happens to be like this big head psychiatrist at a hospital. So, he's got an understanding of Popperian epistemology, of David Deutsch's views, but he also understands the reality of mental illness. He strongly has come down on, yes, mental illness is real. There's really such a thing as your mind has gone wrong.

[01:38:33]  Unidentified speaker: Of course, he's seen this on a regular basis, right?

[01:38:35]  Bruce: Where you bring the person in, their personality, they want to do this or that, you strap them down against their will, you coerce them, you force them to take medications they don't want to take. And then the original person comes back, right? And they're so glad. And he says, we're fighting between two personalities, one that's dysfunctional and then the original person's personality. We're literally deciding which one are we gonna kill, right? Like one of the two personalities is gonna die, which one is it? And we're choosing the one that we think is the better personality, right?

[01:39:05]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:39:06]  Bruce: And like, yes, it's coercive, but like this is just real, mental illness is just real.

[01:39:13]  Unidentified speaker: And so any point of view where you're saying, no, it's not real. Nope, sorry. Well, we need to have him on the podcast. Yeah, we probably should. He would be great to talk about this. He's done a number of podcasts too. So I think he'll probably be interested in doing that. In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I don't think Michael Golding ever said that we're trying to decide which personality to kill. That was more my spin on it.

[01:39:38]  Bruce: So yeah, I felt like this doesn't... The reason why I read this one is because it does sort of work in this. The overall topic here is obviously coercion and how does coercion fit with Popperian epistemology. And Popper makes a point when he talks about free trade of hydrogen bombs. He's making a point about the fact that we... I don't know, maybe libertarians are in favor of free trade of hydrogen bombs. I think most of us would see that as absolutely wrong. And I would agree it is absolutely wrong. And that if libertarians believe in that, they are in the wrong, right? And so Popper's point as a practical matter is, you just cannot take principles like this to their limits.

[01:40:25]  Unidentified speaker: And it's a mistake to think you can. Yeah. Well, that's one of the most interesting answers to the Fermi paradox, is that, I mean, technology might get to the point where you just can't control things like the free trade of nuclear bombs.

[01:40:45]  Peter: And that's how, or something far worse than that.

[01:40:50]  Unidentified speaker: And that's how civilizations, advanced civilizations die.

[01:40:55]  Peter: And that's why we don't see any evidence for aliens in the universe. I don't know. I don't know if we're ever going to wrap this podcast up in a satisfying way, Bruce, but I've enjoyed listening to you.

[01:41:07]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:41:07]  Bruce: Thank you very much.

[01:41:08]  Unidentified speaker: We can end it here. Okay.

[01:41:10]  Unidentified speaker: Sounds good. Okay. Take care, Bruce. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Bye bye.

[01:41:21]  Peter: Hello again. If you've made it this far, please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use, or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes. As you probably know, we are a podcast loosely tied together by the Popper Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch's Four Strands tie everything together. So we discuss science, knowledge, computation, politics, art, and especially the search for artificial general intelligence. Also, please consider connecting with Bruce on X at BNielson01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[01:42:06]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.