Potential Debate Topics

These are brief statements of some controversial ideas I believe. They are mostly unexplained conclusions. I’m not trying to argue my case here (just a little bit here and there). You can search my writing and discussion archives for explanations and reasoning. You can use this list to help find something you disagree with me about, which you could then research, ask questions about, or debate.

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It’s possible and desirable to raise children without doing anything to them against their will. No punishments, no force, nothing that’d be illegal to do to an adult neighbor, no manipulative guiding, no agendas, no curriculums, no assumption that, in a disagreement, the parent is correct.

Objectivism is the best philosophy in general. Critical Rationalism offers improvements re refuting induction and replacing it with a fallibilist evolutionary epistemology.

I favor abortion. Only intelligent beings are moral agents, not fetuses. Abortion should not be “safe, legal and rare”, nor is it something to personally disapprove of. It’s either murder or it’s not. If it’s murder, it should be illegal. If it’s not murder, what’s to disapprove of? If you’re unsure, you should want abortion to be illegal because we should err on the side of caution when murder is at stake. For the sake of being careful, I’m fine with banning third trimester abortions (except e.g. when medically necessary to save the mother). I’m confident there isn’t an intelligent being until a while after there is a brain with electric signals. I don’t think that’s an ambiguous gray area. I’ve read the earliest brain activity that (very conservatively) starts to plausibly resemble consciousness starts around the start of the third trimester, but I haven’t researched an exact cutoff date. I don’t think birth corresponds to gaining intelligence, and I think it’s conceivable that a baby isn’t an intelligent being for a few weeks after birth.

Animals aren’t intelligent so they don’t have moral rights. The word “intelligent” has two related meanings. Sometimes it’s used to refer to degrees of intelligence – Joe is smarter than Bob. But it’s also used to refer to a distinction between intelligent or non-intelligent, e.g. a rock is not intelligent. The mainstream view is that animals are intelligent but to a lesser degree than humans (some people even claim that some animals are more intelligent than a 2 year old child). I claim animals are fundamentally different than human beings because humans can learn anything that can be learned (including by aliens or artificial intelligences) while animals don’t learn at all. Animals are robots which are controlled by software (developed by evolution) which is like a more complicated version of a computer-controlled video game character. It’s like an advanced Roomba.

I’m an atheist. I also reject superstitious ideas like luck, karma, reincarnation, the afterlife, ghosts, angels, devils, demons, voodoo, spoon bending, ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, fortune telling, astrology, talking to dead people (mediums), etc.

U.S. Christians and Jews are no more irrational, superstitious or unreasonable than atheists on average. Of major groups, Christians do the best job of understanding and promoting important, traditional American values like freedom. They’re more resistant to socialism, environmentalism, and other evil ideologies which violate common sense. They’re more willing to disagree with the assertions of human authorities like “scientists” or government officials.

Christianity was barbaric originally but improved along with civilization. It’s civilized now, at least in the English speaking countries. Islam is uncivilized today.

I favor pure laissez-faire capitalism. I will debate for “minarchy” (aka “nightwatchman state”) – a minimal government providing law, order, courts, police, military but leaving the economy alone. I’m open to anarchist ideas but generally don’t advocate them because minarchy is the correct goal for the foreseeable future.

I favor classical liberalism which advocates freedom (including free markets) and limited government power. As violence is irrational and destructive, no one should initiate force (including threat of force or fraud). Defensive force is OK. To learn more about liberalism and (Austrian) economics the main authors to read are Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Ayn Rand and George Reisman.

Parents torture children for twenty plus years and destroy their rationality. Teachers are no better. Parenting needs to be reformed with rational epistemology – Critical Rationalism – so that parents and teachers are primarily helpers rather than leaders or guiders of children. People should manage their own learning and pursue their own goals, not have goals and conclusions imposed on them by authority. Parents should interpret all disobedience, misbehavior and not-listening as disagreements where the fallible parent may well be mistaken and rational truth seeking is the way forward. In the event of failure to reach agreement, the parent should follow liberal principles like leaving people alone instead of using force.

Romantic relationships are broken and irrational rather than a wonderful good idea. Relationships should be more varied instead of everyone following the same model. “Love” is a bad, ambiguous idea. Positive emotions are overrated and in this case often come from conformity to static memes. Jealousy is bad. In the long run, most marriages that don’t end in divorce are unhappy or merely OK. The fear of rejection, the stress of asking a girl out, the waiting and hoping a boy will notice you, the lipstick, the dancing, the partying, etc., are bad things. The heavy reliance on stereotyped interactions like dates and saying “sweet nothings” are bad.

Polyamorous people generally especially like and value love and sex. I think those are overrated. And they’re naive about how hard it is to interact closely with other human beings. It’s hard enough to have one romantic partner without fighting. More partners makes it harder because it’s more complicated and non-traditional.

When in doubt, follow traditions. By default, follow traditions. There are two main reasons to go against tradition. First, you can pick a small number of things to try to improve in your life. You can’t change everything but you can make a few improvements if you study and research what you’re doing a ton (which people rarely do). Second, you have to violate some traditions when they contradict each other. Contradictions between traditions give one no choice but to (partially) go against a tradition and are the main reason to do that.

Genes (or other biology) don’t have any direct influence over our intelligence or personality. We have free will. What kind of person someone grows up to be depends on the ideas they’re exposed to and accept, and their own choices. Genes play fairly non-controlling indirect roles, e.g. if you’re tall more people will encourage you to play basketball. All people are born with essentially equal intellectual capacity. Dumb people are people with bad ideas about how to think.

Human minds aren’t a collection of modules or compartments (for e.g. language, math, art, science, visual-spatial thinking, etc.). We have a single, general purpose, universal intelligence.

Environmentalism is evil. The basic idea is to reject human values and what’s good for humans and instead use nature as the standard of value. Global warming is a scare story to justifying oppressive government intervention in the economy. The “science” is shoddy. Environmentalism has some appeal because it’s confused with reasonable stuff like e.g. having clean lakes, but that is something generally favored and provided by non-environmentalists once there is enough wealth to afford it. The actual goal of the green movement is to shut down industry, not to encourage reasonable reforms and improvements when they become cheap enough to be worth it.

Unions, minimum wage, rent control and many other allegedly pro-worker and pro-poor-people policies harm everyone including workers and poor people.

There are no conflicts of interest between rational men. Self-interest is harmonious with the general welfare. Marxist class warfare is unnecessary and irrational. Workers and employers both benefit by cooperation (and, in the freer countries, people reasonably often change groups in both directions).

The vast majority of studies in the social “sciences”, like psychology, are low quality and should be ignored. The most common problem is they find a correlation and pretend they studied causation.

The government shouldn’t fund science, education, healthcare or retirement.

The vast majority of “intellectuals” and academics are social climbers who are faking being smart.

People lie all the time – primarily to themselves with lying to others as a secondary consequence – and are wrong about many of their claims about themselves. People are often wrong about why they want something, what they meant by a statement, or why they did an action. Being wrong about those things is often due to lying to themselves. People are often mistaken or lying (to themselves) about what their intentions were (e.g. they say they had good intentions but didn’t). People are often mistaken about whether they are angry, emotional or upset.

The laws of epistemology, computation and logic technically depend on the laws of physics. They aren’t a priori. (They are mostly autonomous. It’s generally OK to study them directly without studying physics.) Nothing is a priori. You can’t get away from physics and our understanding of physics is connected to observation of reality (experience).

Induction is an error and myth. No one has ever learned anything by induction. Induction doesn’t describe a physically possible series of actions.

A successful alternative to induction was offered by Karl Popper.

Men have more to gain by peace than war. Peace is strictly better.

Overall, I support president Trump. He was my second choice after Ted Cruz. My main complaints are that he has done much less than he promised. No wall, no dramatic reduction in immigration, no end to anchor babies, no end to Obamacare, and he’s worked with the GOP establishment a fair amount instead of draining that part of the swamp. Obama was the worst, most destructive president for a long time (maybe since the New Deal), and has anti-American values.

Infallible proof is impossible. Whatever arguments you make, whether a formal deduction, a mathematical proof, or claiming 2+2=4, you had to evaluate whether that’s true with a physical process like thoughts in your brain, and the correctness of your conclusion is dependent on your understanding of the properties of that physical process, and your understanding of the laws of physics is certainly fallible. (This argument was originated by David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality chapter 10.)

Most arguments are not inductive, deductive nor abductive. They aren’t equivalent to any of those. They’re just regular arguments. They don’t even have a special name. The main purposes of argument are to criticize and explain.

The French Revolution was evil and destructive.

People make choices about their interests, personality, sexual orientation and gender identity. Some choices are made in early childhood, forgotten about, and very hard to figure out how to change later. And choices are made while externally pressured. That doesn’t make something a biological non-choice, though.

Over 90% of the pleasure people feel during sex is due to ideas and mental interpretations, not biology or physical sensations. Sense data, including nerve data relating to pleasure or pain, is open to interpretation. As Karl Popper says, all observation is theory laden. Raw data doesn’t have an inherent meaning. Our ideas give it meaning and direct our attention selectively to the aspects we consider important.

All finite data sets are logically compatible with infinitely many explanations, patterns or conclusions. There is no such thing as which claims “better fit” the data – the data contradicts some claims and does not contradict others.

Correlation does not hint at causation.

Evolution is replication with variation and selection. That’s the origin of life on Earth. Evolution of memes (ideas, not joke images) is literally evolution, not an analogy.

Morality is objective. Everything is objective. We live in physical reality. It’s one single, shared reality for all people. Truths about this reality do not depend on who is inquiring. There are objective facts about how foods taste to you, which foods you should buy given your physical tastebuds, ideas, budget, etc. And there are truths about what ideas you have and what tastebuds you have and your bank account balance and income, all of which are parts of physical reality.

Solipsism, relativism, nihilism, and skepticism are false.

Cognitive biases, qualia and mirror neurons are confusions.

We live in a multiverse. There are trillions or infinite versions of you. The multiverse is local (no faster than light motion or communication). This is the best current understanding of physics. People who disagree are almost all ignorant or irrational, rather than innocently mistaken.

If you’re wrong about that idea, by what process can someone who knows you’re wrong correct you? Intellectuals should have good general-purpose answers to this in writing.

Arguments don’t have degrees of strength. There aren’t weak and highly compelling arguments. Arguments are conclusive or non-conclusive. If all arguments are non-conclusive, instead of tiebreaking between options without any conclusive way to decide, one can and should create a conclusive argument related to how to proceed.

One can always act on non-refuted ideas. Not merely as a theoretical possibility but as a practical, rational option that one should do. There’s never any good reason to act on a refuted idea.

All correct positive arguments (arguments in favor of something) can be translated into negative arguments (arguments against stuff). If it can’t be translated, it’s incorrect. The negative argument version is the more rigorous and formal version of the argument. Arguments refute. They only support as a loose statement, an approximation.

No Partial Universality: There are no classical computers that can compute 90% of what can be classically computed. (Classical computation is what Macs, Windows PCs, iPhones and Androids do. It excludes quantum computation which is related to quantum physics.) When adding features to a simple classical computing system, it jumps straight from near-zero functionality to universality. Universality and jumps to universality also come up in other areas, e.g. with ability to learn. There are no learners that can learn 90% of what can be learned. Learning systems jump from near-zero to universality.

Serious debates should be done publicly online, in writing, over days/weeks, with no editing or deleting messages, with written methodology for how to reach a conclusion or end the debate.

Intellectuals who are too busy to talk with everyone should have written policies for who they talk to, how much, etc., so it’s all predictable and people who believe they have something important to say can meet the policy requirements and get to discuss it. A major design goal of these policies should be combatting bias (so the policies don’t biasedly suppress certain ideas from being discussed).

The “burden of proof” idea is a misconception.

Don’t ignore “small” errors. You can’t reliably tell how small an error an idea is without correcting it. Once you have a solution, you can say in retrospect that it turned out to be a small, easy, quick fix. But knowing that in advance would be predicting the future growth of knowledge which is impossible.

Rational thinkers address every criticism of their ideas. They never ignore criticism. People who don’t know how to do this in an adequately time efficient manner need to learn how rather than make excuses. In particular, you can criticize patterns or categories of arguments at the same time, as a group, rather than addressing criticisms one by one. You should write down your arguments so that you can reference them in response to repeat criticisms, thus allowing the critic to learn why he’s mistaken and/or share an additional criticism about your argument.

Psychiatry is the modern inquisition. They aren’t doctors or scientists, they are a mechanism of social control. They suppress deviants, heretics, “misbehavior” (behavior unwanted by by those with more power and social status). Psychiatric diagnostic criteria are vague and non-objective because they’re judgment calls about conformity to largely-unwritten social rules.

Standard ideas about what foods are healthy to eat are full of fads and myths. Diets affecting energy levels and mood is primarily placebo. Balancing individual meals is dumb – better to balance what you eat during a whole day or a week. But the food groups and balancing methods are dumb too.

Current AGI (artificial general intelligence) research is working on dead ends. AGI workers should learn Critical Rationalism to make progress. Also non-AGI work called “AI”, such as software to play chess or drive cars, is useful but isn’t substantial progress towards AGI. An AGI won’t be created by combining a bunch of non-general modules like those.

Anti-semitism is wrong. The U.S. political left and media are broadly anti-semitic. Israel and Zionism are good. Anti-Israel political views are due to anti-semitism. The IDF is the world’s kindest military. (I would say most moral except I think they sacrifice too many Israeli lives, both military personnel and civilians, to prevent collateral damage. Plus they have conscription.) The Israel and the IDF doesn’t mistreat or abuse Muslims, they bend over backwards to be fair, generous, peaceful, reasonable, etc.

The USA is by far the best and most important country. It’s the leader of the civilized world.

Slavery isn’t in the rational self-interest of the slavers. And USA wasn’t built on slavery. Slavery is economically inefficient, not a source of industrial-age wealth.

If someone was really strongly motivated by greed, they’d learn economics and choose not to be a slaver, thief, fraudster, etc. Greed would motivate them to produce and trade, not to hurt anyone. The most effective way to get rich in a free country is by mutually beneficial social cooperation. But the more the government interferes in the economy, the more opportunities it creates for men to get rich by oppression and tyranny instead.

“Pickup Artist” (PUA) ideas are broadly correct about how dating works and what women want. Search “Dating and Social Dynamics” on the FI book recommendations for sources. Disclaimer: other sources may be bad. The PUA materials I respect are standard, popular ones connected to the original discussion forums, but there’s also a lot of other stuff which is crap.

All women are like that (AWALT).

Social metaphysics, altruism and second-handedness (see Objectivism for details) are evil.

Death, disease and weakness due to aging are a solvable medical problem. If ignored, aging will harm and kill every single person alive today along with all of our great grandchildren. It’s a big, urgent problem – far more important than global warming even if that were correct. It merits much more medical research than it receives. Arguments for not trying to solve aging (e.g. overpopulation, people getting bored with living, divine punishment) are wrong.

Many discussions fail because people are too impatient and intolerant about disagreement. People largely don’t understand how different another person’s ideas can be than their own, and aren’t interested in learning about ideas their prejudices say are unreasonable (but which they haven’t refuted and can’t cite any refutation of by anyone that they’d endorse).

Keynesian economics was refuted by Hazlitt’s Failure of the 'New Economics’. This is one of many examples showing intellectual culture is broken: often the right ideas are more ignored than responded to. Intellectually, in terms of objective truth-seeking, Keynes and his fans lost the debate (substantially by refusing to debate, refusing to study and engage with rival ideas). But they remain much more influential than the superior ideas which out-argued them. The primary issue is people ignoring ideas, not people learning the ideas but then coming to a different, reasonable evaluation of their merits. Most intellectuals are unreasonable, irrational, ignorant, uncurious, dishonest and aren’t truth seekers.

Steelmanning and the principle of charity are overrated approximations. They don’t involve substantial understanding of epistemology which reveals many limitations. They’re fairly commonly used to make discussions worse rather than better.

Ideas rule the world.

Everyone/anyone can contribute to truth seeking and ideas. Each person who chooses not to is individually guilty of refusing to think much and choosing not to participate significantly in the key issues affecting the fate of civilization. You should care about ideas instead of leaving it to alleged experts. You should read, study, debate, etc., in a patient, curious, serious way.

A key separator of rational truth seekers and dishonest frauds is unbounded pursuit of truth. Most people have some limits beyond which they won’t think.

Making progress effectively requires managing your error rate. Do things easy enough to keep your weighted error rate plus a buffer (to handle variance) below your error correction capacity. If you want to do harder or more complex things, build up to them. Learn more so they’re easier for you (can be done with fewer errors). And increase your error correction capacity. Doing stuff early is inefficient at best and often leads to failure.

If you want to do a project, consider what prior projects of a similar nature you’ve done successfully. Have you already succeeded at one or several projects with 80% or more of the difficulty and complexity of the one you want to do now? You should have. E.g. if you want to debate or study a complex intellectual topic, you should have a history of success doing that kind of activity. If you don’t, start simpler and get it right.

Learning effectively works by getting things right first and dealing with other aspects like speed, memory, forming habits or increasing complexity second. E.g. when learning typing, focus on correctness first and speed up second. If you speed up first, then try to fix your errors, you’re trying to fix the errors at high speed; it would have been easier to fix them earlier on at lower speed. Similarly, figure out how to have a simple rational, productive conversation successfully and correctly before trying for hard ones. Don’t try to learn everything at once. Try to isolate what you’re learning and learn a few things at a time.

Deplatforming is a major problem. It’s not simply the right of private tech companies to have whatever moderation policies or algorithms they want. They advertise fraudulently about how they are unbiased. They lobby for and get special government favors and privileges. The alternatives aren’t either to oppose deplatforming on statist grounds or to accept it (regretfully? but I don’t see many expressions of regret). One can make a classical liberal case against it.

We should go back to a gold standard for money. Prices are directly related to the supply of money. When the government prints money, it raises prices (which lowers the value of savings, so it’s like a wealth tax). The single best feature of a gold standard is that the government can’t print gold.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are worthless investment frauds. As investments they’re similar to a Ponzi scheme where earlier investors are paid by newer investors and it falls apart when people stop buying in. The software is terrible from a technical perspective, the companies involved are incompetent, and the main use case is to facilitate money laundering and crime.

Immigration should be restricted as part of defense against violence, because our welfare state gives big handouts to anyone here, and because our government has many oppressive powers – it’s not properly limited – so it’s dangerous to allow people to vote who don’t have civilized Western values.

Fossil fuels are great. Nuclear power is even better for electricity, though not for gasoline or plastic.

Affirmative action is racist. America is an especially non-racist country – except the leftist political activists who bring up race so much.

You have no right to make demands about what pronouns I use to refer to you. I’ll normally use “he”, “she” or maybe “they” at people’s request, but not any arbitrary words, and I’m not obligated to, it’s just a courtesy. My speech, my choice. It’s also OK to use previous names of public figures.

Grammar is useful to learn.

Being economically literate is roughly as important and useful as being scientifically literate. Fewer than 1% of people have basic economic literacy – e.g. they couldn’t correctly figure out the economic consequences of minimum wage laws (on their own without looking it up – it’s a simple enough issue that you should be able to do that) and they can’t reliably, consistently avoid all variations of the broken window fallacy.

“Picky” and “pedantic” arguments often matter. Ask people why they think the issue matters (often it’s a clarity issue – and clarity should be one of your main goals in writing or speaking about ideas) or fix it. It’s such a minor issue, correct it. A good policy is to ask what the point is if a person makes three arguments in a row that seem pointless to you, not one. Bring up problematic patterns but react initially, the first time, with some patience, tolerance, and willingness to consider a different person’s perspective. Don’t assume bad faith immediately. Good faith means they think it’s important for some reason or they wouldn’t be saying it. Also it’s possible they don’t understand how to discuss/debate properly and rationally but would appreciate finding that out and discussing what kinds of arguments are important or productive to make and why (this is different than them making dumb arguments on purpose to derail the conversation).

Reading (or skimming) until the first disagreement/problem/criticism is a good way of dealing with sources, articles, books, etc. that come up in discussions/debates. Refusing to look at them is a bad way.

Knowing foreign languages is overrated. (So are many other ways of being “cultured”). Learning to code is better than learning a second natural language. The exception is that English is the most important language, so people who don’t know it should learn. If you want to study philosophy and other good ideas, English is a crucial tool. Setting aside its widespread use, English is also superior to the world’s other major languages for communicating ideas.

People wear shoes that are too narrow due to dumb fashion preferences. Pinky toes aren’t supposed to be squished. Shoes actually change the shape of their feet. It’s so widespread it’s hard to get reasonable shoes. A substantial portion of parents fight with their kids to make them wear shoes. Kids often want to take their shoes off because the shoes are uncomfortable because they’re deforming the kid’s feet. It takes a long time, but being forced to wear uncomfortable shoes for years eventually causes permanent deformation.

Male circumcision is genital mutilation. People should stop doing it. People should have to jump through some sort of hoops to get it done (e.g. saying it’s important to their religion and signing a form). People who don’t care that much shouldn’t be able to carelessly or casually get it done. Female genital mutilation should be entirely illegal, no exceptions.

There should be no laws requiring children to go to school, e.g. no truancy laws. If a parent wants to force his kid to go to school, that’s his business, but the police and government shouldn’t help him do it. Compulsory school attendance is imprisonment without trial. Children may be ignorant of many things, but they are experts on whether they personally like or dislike school, whether they find it tolerable or intolerable, etc.

Serious, truth seeking discussion/debate should be done publicly, in writing, online, using block quotes liberally, over days/weeks/months.

The goal of a rational discussion/debate is to understand and add to the current, objective state of the debate. For complex issues, understanding what arguments already exist and how they interact (what questions are unanswered, what refutes what, etc.) is important to be able to productively add to the debate. Clarifying the existing situation is what many fields need more than they need new arguments to be chaotically added to the mix.

There is a single objective truth. For empirical issues it corresponds to objective reality (which exists). There are also truths for other issues like epistemology and morality (which, though technically connected to empirical reality, we study in a mostly independent way, so we call them non-empirical as an approximation.)

Rational people can quickly reach agreement in discussion. We don’t have all the answers but we can agree that some knowledge is inconclusive. When a range of views are reasonable, people can agree on what that range is (rather than bickering over their intuitions about which of the reasonable views, which it’s narrowed down to, is the best current guess). When someone is missing a bunch of background knowledge, agreement can be reached that, given their ignorance, they shouldn’t reach conclusions about certain issues until they know more. Inconclusive, unproductive discussions/debates are an indication of irrationality by at least one participant.

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In the comments below, please post links (with one sentence saying what they are) to other controversial ideas I have which would make good debate topics. You can also share links to my writing about the topics above or debate them.