i've been trying to figure out a good word that means roughly no-authority, but approaches the issue in a positive way, saying what the concept *is* rather than isn't, and not mentioning any opposing view. i don't think there is such a word! :(((

the word "freedom" isn't specific and clear enough. same for "liberal", "liberty", "reason" or "rational".

the words "humility" and "modesty" are too negative and have mistakes mixed in. their synonyms are worse.

"decentralized" doesn't get the point across well, it's too much of a special case.

"non-justificationist" would not be understood, nor would "fallibilist".

The word "independence", like some of the others, is too connected with politics not philosophy. also, like some of the others, lots of people who are pro-authority would be in favor of it and not see the contradiction

"cooperation" is too specific (not covering all the meaning) and people won't understand the connection

"no-authority" or "anti-authority" are both defining it in terms of what it's not. i want a word which means the right concept, rather than just denying an opposing view

some other potentially useful words are, "self-rule" (which sounds way too much like being your own authority), "self-determination", "autonomous"

btw if you look up the antonyms of "authority", they are terrible. they are words like weakness, powerlessness, inferiority, and disadvantage. that is what people think lack of authority is like. it tells you something about how badly they want authority, and see authority as a major goal and all around desirable thing. http://thesaurus.com/browse/authority

it's really sad, and says something about our culture, that there's no anti-authority word that is on par with the word "authority" for clarity, being well known and understood, applying broadly, and other things one would want from a word which make it easy to use effectively. like you can use "authority" for both political and epistemological discussions and people won't blink, they won't find it at all odd, weird, confusing or objectionable, it's just natural. but with a word like "independence", that's primarily a political word, and people will hesitate if they see it in a philosophy context.


one place I'd like to use this word is a slogan. something kinda like:

initiative, responsibility, criticism, persuasion, humility

the other words there are decent enough but "humility" is bad


another reason i want a no-authority word is for epistemology discussion. i've identified rejection of authority as perhaps the most important theme of the good epistemology, more than fallibilism, criticism, rationalism, objectivity, or existence (Rand considered "Existentialism" before "Objectivism", but it was taken).

i think the top two epistemology concepts are no-authority and error-correction. both are implied by fallibility but no one knows that. (nor do they know much about the relationship between the "critical" in "critical rationalism" and error-correction).

they also both imply each other. the rejection of authority entails needing to worry about error (as opposed to trusting authority to be right). and correcting errors requires considering the merits of ideas, rather than their amount of authority.


another word that would be nice is error-correction as one word. but that's not so important because error-correction is a descriptive phrase that positively identifies the right thing to do, without mentioning any opposing view.


another word I'd like is a positive word for non-TCS-coercion. "common preference finding" doesn't work well, it's too specific and is jargon.


another word I'd like is a positive word for non-force. there's "peace" but that's for groups not an individual level. there's "cooperation" but using that word does not communicate to people "no force allowed". people will consider relationships involving some force to be "cooperative". there's "voluntary" and "consensual" but they don't really capture it.


post suggestions in the comments

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It is not fitting for humans to take on parochial labor roles. Rather than divide labor, we must abolish it: labor is for machines. When we have universal machines construct according to our mind and thought, then each man will be an island, and there shall be no more division of labor.

I wrote this argument with references to four people. Who are they?

I won't say if guesses are correct unless you get all four exactly, or you explain the reasoning for your guess.

Bonus points if you can figure out what the argument is saying, analyze whether it's a good argument, and explain why I consider this puzzle worthwhile.

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http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X

this book doesn't use critical thinking. it takes some evidence and tells a story to explain it and doesn't tell us how it knows that story is correct and not some other story. it doesn't consider and criticize rival explanations. it just gives selective attention, over and over, to favored explanations. why are those explanations favored? it never says.

each influence tactic it discusses it acknowledged as fallible. but there's no extensive discussion about when and why they fail. the author doesn't seek explanations about what differentiates the successes and failures, instead he simply accepts and ignores the failure rate. the "scientists" involved in the field try to argue that X causes Y by doing an experiment where X happens and Y results, with a control with no X and no Y. they don't consider the Z and W that also differed between the test group and the control. but they also don't consider what A, B or C could be added to stop it from working anymore, or what background factors D, E, and F are required to be present for the X/Y relationship to work.

generally, the book is concerned with selective positive claims and not with error, correcting error, or considering everything.

the book is also sometimes wrong, incompetent or dishonest about technical details. in one case it described a drop from 38% to 10% as impressive. but it was in circumstances where we would have expected a 2/3 drop anyway. a 2/3 drop already gets us down to 12.66% so the observed drop could easily be within the margin of error, but that isn't mentioned. there was also a straightforward reason for a greater than 2/3 drop. yet the 38% to 10% drop was simply presented as a large drop scientifically proving the point – it was treated as evidence of the author's particular story about why there would be a drop in this case.

another issue is the book doesn't try to apply what it claims we're learning. it will raise some point, e.g. that people are biased in a particular way in a particular kind of situation. then it won't go looking for what other situations that applies to. for example it talked about fraternity hazing and how people try to act consistent with their sunk costs, so if they already went through tough hazing then they try to like the group they joined. hazing is an easy target but why not consider whether the same principle can be used to criticize some less well known target? for example people with PhDs is a group with high costs to enter it, so should people with PhDs watch out for bias regarding how much they think their PhD was worth the price and how nice life in the PhD recipient group is? the book consistently doesn't go the extra mile to consider anything controversial, it keeps just discussing psychological factors to make points that are already popular.

the book has other flaws too.

This was originally written in a March 2012 email:

Having a bit of knowledge about physics is important to most fields.

For example: tennis, chess, hockey, baseball, architecture, chemistry, biology, cooking, cleaning, building computers, building chairs, and so on.

The amount of physics knowledge needed for basic competence in this fields is small: the large majority of people in our culture have enough already.

You don't see people trying to heat their food in the freezer.

You don't see people losing tennis tournaments because they were confused about physics.

You don't see people doing chemistry experiments using only water and expecting each portion of water to transmute into the right chemicals because they want it to.

So, people take for granted having some understanding of physics as background knowledge. That knowledge still matters and it's still correct to say physics has a lot of reach even if people take it for granted.

If you get this basic physics stuff wrong, you can be really screwed. All sorts of stuff can go horribly wrong. Getting it right does matter a lot.

In general you don't need to know the details of quantum physics. That has less reach. It's quite important for some stuff like building nanometer-scale computer chips. But you don't need to know any quantum physics to win a tennis tournament or cook dinner or even to build a skyscraper.


To do basic science you do need to know some physics, but often not quantum physics, and often not any physics that goes beyond the background knowledge your average scientist will have and get right. If they messed up the physics they need, it could easily invalidate all their experiments in their field and make all their conclusions wrong, but in practice this rarely comes up because they don't get it wrong.

There are people who get a lot of basic physics wrong. We call them superstitious or gullible or stuff like that. It matters. But they are a minority. And a lot of the people watching science TV shows or getting fooled by bending spoons or talking about "crystal energy" or "dreamcatchers" aren't actually getting physics wrong, they are making different kinds of mistakes like they think it helps provide meaning for their life and they intentionally don't think about whether the physics is right or not.


Epistemology is a lot like physics in this regard. A relatively small amount of epistemology knowledge is relevant and important to pretty much every human endeavor. It matters to tennis, chess, hockey, baseball, architecture, and all the rest, same as with physics.

And our culture has some good quality knowledge of epistemology which people take for granted and routinely use.

But, contrary to physics, most have large mistakes in their basic epistemology background knowledge. There are widespread mistakes in our culture. And they don't just affect some special minorities that stand out, they affect 99%.

The result? All sorts of stuff goes wrong, and people don't know why or sometimes don't even know something went wrong.

People do lose tennis tournaments due to bad epistemology. That's actually common. Top people in all types of competition face significant psychological issues. They have to keep the right kind of mindset and focus to play their best. And what happens is they get to the finals and make a mistake. Then they make 5 more mistakes. Then, some people will set it aside and continue to play their best. But other people will get frustrated and have the wrong attitude to mistakes and let it "rattle" them, and will "lose focus" and start playing worse and making more mistakes they wouldn't normally make if they were relaxed in a low pressure situation, or wouldn't make if they weren't frustrated with previous mistakes.

Sometimes these problems dealing with mistakes decide a match. Better attitudes to mistakes and learning, and better understanding of their mind and emotions -- better philosophical knowledge -- could have won the match.

Sometimes players come back the next year, get in a similar situation, but then get past it and win this time. They thought hard about it and improved their epistemological knowledge (and some other knowledge too). Without knowing the name of the field. Without having the benefit of a lot of already-known and useful stuff in the field. They have to re-invent some stuff, and pick some up in bits and pieces from advice from their coach and sports/competition-related books and so on.

Some people never get past these mental issues and never become champions. That's common too. It's hard to reinvent enough epistemology and pick it up from scattered places. More people fail at this than succeed.


Epistemology comes up, and sometimes goes wrong, in all sorts of more mundane situations too. People get frustrated while playing a video game and throw the controller at the TV and break it, or just feel bad. People get stuck playing a video game and don't improve. People fight with their friends when playing a team video game and blame each other for letting the team down. Bad epistemology (in the background knowledge of our culture that people take for granted) contributes to these problems and good epistemology could address them.


And epistemology comes up, and goes wrong, when scientists start talking philosophy and trying to draw philosophical conclusions from their work.


Just like there are some places where physics reaches more (e.g. building GPS devices) and more advanced physics is important, there are also places where epistemology reaches more and more advanced epistemology is important.

Without physics well beyond the background knowledge in our culture, you're going to have a lot of problems building a GPS device. The background knowledge isn't even close to good enough.

And without more advanced knowledge of epistemology, you're going to design schools wrong. Education is an area where epistemology very heavily reaches. The background knowledge about epistemology in our culture is faulty, but the error rate with some of the "more advanced" knowledge (like explicit versions of induction, empiricism, justificationism and other stuff you can read in philosophy books) is a lot worse.

It's a bit like using superstition to build a GPS device. It's so wrong that you make a compete and utter mess of things.

That is, by the way, why our schools are "failing". (They don't even know what succeeding would be and are judging be the wrong criteria. But our schools do happen to be bad according to better criteria too. FYI US schools are far better than all the asian countries though.)


So there are various areas where epistemology is extra relevant. You don't just need a bit, you need lots. Everything has to do with learning, but some stuff more than others.

Epistemology heavy topics include: education (including lots of parenting stuff), morality, stuff to do with organizing knowledge (like programming or organizing a library), stuff to do with brains, stuff to do with how people or animals or computers or anything think or learn or create knowledge, stuff to do with evolution, stuff to do with ideas or types of ideas (like the distinctions people draw between emotions vs theories vs values vs guesses, etc), qualia, stuff to do with fallibility, errors, mistakes, sources of error, good explanations, judging explanations, methods of interpreting observations, scientific methods (b/c the point of science is to create knowledge, so the methods for doing that are methods of creating knowledge, methods in epistemology).


When scientists try to do science to address questions about how people think and live, and how that compares with animals, and the consequences for morality, they are straying especially heavily into epistemology in multiple ways and going far beyond what cultural background knowledge can be expected to handle (sort of handle, but actually fail a fair amount). When their epistemology is grossly false, they make multiple large mistakes per substantial idea in these areas, and so all their conclusions are crap.

The typical pattern of romantic relationships: people hurt themselves and blame their partners.

This evasion prevents most self-improvement.

Other areas of life are similar. When someone doesn't have the career or social role they want, they typically hurt themselves far more than anyone else hurts them.

learning productivity multipliers (such as philosophy) ASAP is most efficient by far. i think that's something worth aggressively optimizing.

for example, some people prioritize their career ahead of philosophy. so then they do all kinds of career stuff which they could have done twice as fast if they were better at philosophy and a few other skills. like they have to learn some skills for work, and they learn them slowly, whereas if they knew more about learning they could have learned it a lot faster.

or people start dating and get married before learning about romance philosophy. big mistake.

besides philosophy first being a more efficient order (if are ever going to learn to learn faster, the sooner you do that the more efficient, since you get to use it in the most cases), it also helps deal with mistakes of various kinds (like marriage. marriage shouldn't be done at all at any speed).

how is one to know whether he's making a big picture mistake he'll regret later, without knowing lots of philosophy? i think it's a serious risk. this includes both risks of doing things badly out of order so it's really inefficient and also risks of doing something that shouldn't be done at all in any order.

so learn a substantial amount of philosophy ASAP or huge risk of disaster. those are the only choices.

put another way, you should start on the beginning of infinity track, now. that means thinking, learning, aiming for lots of speedy progress. you've gotta start making progress now, not at some indeterminate point in the future. and if you're trying to make rapid progress as your standard way of life, then to do it well you've gotta learn what's known about how to do that (which is called "philosophy").

ppl often seem to think the risks of doing their life as-is and meeting current preferences are low. they think that things seem to be going pretty well, how bad can it be? maybe they even know some philosophy and fixed some mistakes, and think there can't be too many more (uhh what? how do you know how many more there could be? we're all alike in our infinite ignorance!)

i think basically anything but doing quite a bit of philosophy is extremely risky. also i do and know more philosophy than you and i'm telling you it's risky. so why are you doubting me when you have no criticisms of my philosophical positions? and since you do way less philosophy, how would you even evaluate the risk? it takes philosophy to evaluate how much danger there is and to do anything about the danger. so how can you decide it's an ok risk to take when you lack the knowledge to even understand the risk?