CMV: The NSA should stop spying on us and I'm ok with the consequences of that.

The "real" question. Can we agree that that implies that the previous question is (one of) the wrong one? Isn't that effectively dismissing that same question?

Nope this is just a further demonstration of your poor comprehension skills. It's rhetoric directed at calling out an invalid and insubstantial argument, which is a fair counter argument.

Once again you are dismissing the argument about lives and freedoms by saying that "most people don't care". If that isn't an ad populum fallacy, I don't see what is.

Ad populum is not what addressing what people care about, it's about addressing what people believe. There is a very subtle but important difference that once again, you don't understand. An argument that is fallacious by ad populum goes along the lines of:

A

People believe A is true.

Thus A is true.

The argument that I presented was in the form of this:

Policy A has effect B and C on privacy and economic earnings respectively.

People value effect C more than they value effect B.

The bills themselves have no value and they don't represent a fixed amount of some material. You could still theoretically define a function of time that would give you the amount of gold equivalent to a dollar. In some wishy-washy sense, yes, you could say that means it "has no value" (I'd argue that the proper way to word it would be "no fixed value independent of time", but whatever).

This makes no sense...

Well, maybe you do, but I for one don't. My life as well as control over it is invaluable. In the current world, it is impossible to replicate, impossible to give or exchange (in the strong sense) in any way. I assign an infinite value (with the highest cardinality) to my life.

Sure you assign an infinite value to your life, but that does not mean everyone else does. And yes you can exchange it. See: Insurance fraud, assassination, kidnapping & ransom and so on. Just because the transaction isn't LEGAL doesn't make it an illegitimate (in the economical sense) transaction.

It doesn't matter how you value your life. I could value the mug on my desk at $20,000,000. That just means no one would buy it from me and it also means if someone were to steal it from me that I would be willing to pay that amount to have it back.

I just don't understand how this view of life makes any sense (but then I don't get why you get a hard-on out of insulting me either, so go figure).

So suppose that I (the guy with the invaluable life) doesn't want it anymore. I'm offing myself or dying for one reason or another. My life is still invaluable, it's just that my assigning it an infinite value has no influence on the fact that it's ending soon. That's the frame of mind people who are trying to commit insurance fraud and the likes seem to be in my experience.

Your lack of knowledge on economics is once again limiting you from understanding valuations, supply, demand, and market price. If something is sold at $X, it doesn't imply it is worth $X to both parties. It just implies that the person buying it was willing to pay $X OR HIGHER. But there are undoubtedly people willing to pay less than $X to pay for it. Does that mean that demand for the product isn't there? No, it just means the demand (ie. worth, utility, etc.) at that PRICE is not high enough for most people. So yes, you can value your life at $infinite. But other people can value it at $1 and their valuation is still valid economically so it is still consistent with economic theory.

In this case, you have an "invaluable" life to you, but its worth $0 to practically everyone else, because you're worthless. So you get zippo out of trying to exchange it. See how economics works now?

In such cases, killing yourself before the last moment, I would argue, has very little to do with the value of "life" and more to do with a more restricted notion of "time" (for lack of a better word).

Time is also a resource and has economic value.

I'm kind of getting your point (it took you only like 20 posts to write one with substance instead of simple insults) that to you life is restricted to that notion of time. I don't agree, but whatever, it's an idea I can agree to disagree with.

And that makes you naive. It's not something to disagree with. It's something that just is. Like how within our mathematical decimal framework 1+1 = 2 in all cases.

Basically, the difference between both of our positions is that I am saying that a T-bone (life) has more value (in the general sense) than just that of the bone itself, that the meat is the most important part. You, on the other hand, either reject the idea that the meat is there or that it has any value (in the general sense). For this reason, it seems, you would call both a bare T-bone and a fleshy T-bone the same thing and value them the same.

The fact that you don't value the meat, doesn't mean that the meat has no value (I would say that as long as it least one person assigns a value to it then it is a proof that is has a value). I guess you could say that I decided that axiomatically. I'm okay with that statement. We clearly chose different axioms.

This analogy stilll makes no sense.

Btw, why you didn't just respond constructively like you just did (minus the insults would have been nice I suppose), is beyond me. Anyway, that's it for me.

It's fun. Why else? :) It gives me utility. If you had an understanding of economics it would have been obvious why I responded the way I did :)

/r/changemyview Thread