Here’s an interesting (old) article I found which shows parralells in the way libertarians think and computer scientists. Basically, they both think in a more systematic, fundamental principle way.
A bit much, don’t you think?
I’ve yet to read the article, but I will tell you as a scientist, Libertarian philosophy is the only political ideology that makes sense.
“A bit much, don’t you think?”
No, it’s very on target actually. Most people don’t think in terms of processes or steps. That’s why people are dumb enough or gullible enough to think that all you need to do to get cheaper and more plentiful health care is for someone to stand up and say, “Let it be thus!” For them, problems boil down to issues of obedience now, not incentives over time. Which is why their ‘solutions’ often only address proximate causes for problems while ignoring ultimate causes. They regard the present as ‘unregulated’ simply because they haven’t passed any regulations themselves., and they regard current problems as the result of current maliciousness because it doesn’t occur to them to look at how past actions might have incentivized current conditions to exist.
Just to contribute, historians think in steps but they are not libertarians. Perhaps all libertarians think in steps but some people who think in steps are not libertarians?
The thing that’s most frustrating to me when I argue with statists is the way they don’t see things in terms of principles. For example, they would agree that free market is desirable in shoes, computers, carpet cleaning, etc… but fail to apply those same principles to why there should be a free market in healthcare or education… or even protection. And they’re against price controls in groceries, but they’re in favor of price controls in labor.
See, I resent that.
People pre-emptively accuse libertarians of having a robot-like inhuman approach to thinking.
I find it outrageous, because it is the ones in support of sweeping legislations who feel that their precise calculations will have precise results.
I thought we were the ones who sold uncertainty. Because we acknowledge being human.
And libertarians only think the same way other human beings do, because they are human. Except they start from the human itself, and not fake arbitrary mathematical calculations Paul Samuelson-style.
I liked the libertarian IQ article but have some quibbles with it.
- CPU’s operate according to deterministic, logical rules. A programmer making software exploits this predictability. The program operates correctly without relying on the behavior of seemingly non-deterministic elements, like multiple simultaneously executing threads vieing for CPU time slices.
However, humans are not like CPU’s. Human behavior cannot be predicted with such precision. Praxeological theorems aren’t enough to justify libertarianism; it rests on more tenuous things like common sense, intuition, values, and certain ethics. A programmer can sometimes produce logical theorems guaranteeing the correct operation of his program or parts of it (though I’ve never seen this in practice - maybe it is done in life support or legal technology?). A libertarian’s opinion does not carry the same intellectual force.
- When I’m in a libertarian frame of mind I tend to think more from a personal point of view. For example, crack cocaine should be legal because smoking it doesn’t hurt other people and I don’t like being deprived of the legal option to smoke it. I don’t need a utilitarian calculus involving the whole world to come to an opinion. I don’t need to play the role of God or overlord like a computer programmer or interventionist does. In fact, I thought the point of libertarianism is to avoid thinking from the point of view of “society”.
I think the article would be better if it compared computer programmers and Austrian economists, not computer scientists and libertarians.
Yeah the author means libertarians not Libertarians.
And really predicting the impact of policies has a lot to do with psychology. The mimium wage law might decrease unemployment if, for some reason, the law created a charitable spark in society so that charity businesses were created to employ those marignalized by the min wage law, or if employers didn’t notice their revenues going down out of stupidity, or something.
By in large, our predictions are right, but it is not only because we realize that human action is purposeful. We also make all these assumptions about people being self interested and somewhat rational. By in large, this is a pretty good approximation, since owners of capital tend to fit this model.
Everyone begins statist in the youth prison system. Becoming libertarian is an unusual process.
Almost everyone thinks that the individuals who have their opinion think in a unique way that yields truth to them compared to the rest of the population that think in a muddled fashion. Such an opinion is pure hubris, though.
If we assume monetary profit maximisation(pretty close to reality in business) and that is the usual approach of logic and also used in the article’s examples, then psychology is excluded and indeed an analytical approach is used.
Haven’t read the article (will soon, though), however I found this statement quite interesting as I used to be a computer scientist (or, rather, majored in CS - until i switched to economics) and am now a libertarian/Austrian economist.
Having been “trained” by both marxists or keynesian economists (undergrad and grad), i almost actually felt dumb since so much of it didn’t make any sense, and yet econ was considered an “easy” subject. It took several months of self-education (thank you, Henry Hazlitt!) to finally understand economics and see through all the BS that is propagated in the media with all the Keynesian/Marxist junk.
<— Another comptuer scientist here.
I have to admit, there is a pattern. I think it’s that many of these people are left-brained-logically dominated.
I’m a Software Engineer Major. 3 more credits and I got my Bachelors degree.
The pattern is that software nerds sit on forums like this all day.
“Just to contribute, historians think in steps but they are not libertarians.” - fakename
Historians think chronologically. Whether they think in steps in terms of cause and effect is something that’s individual to each historian.
“Almost everyone thinks that the individuals who have their opinion think in a unique way that yields truth to them compared to the rest of the population that think in a muddled fashion. Such an opinion is pure hubris, though.” - laminustacitus
I disagree. I do think many libertarians think differently than other people. However I do not think this necessarily implies they have a greater grasp of truth. I know a lot of libertarians who oppose the new immgration law in AZ, as do I. But for many of those libertarians their thought processes are what stop them from understanding why people would pass that law, because those libertarians are solely concerned with the ‘whole debate’ rather than the immediate crap a lot of people in AZ are dealing with.
Sure, that’s got to be a part of it. Still, when I go to the libertarian pub nights or meetings I still find more engineers/programmers than I would in any other setting. It’s not a bad thing for me, though. There’s plenty to talk about, and I learn about job opportunities. 
Have you ever seen a big showing of logicians among libertarians? I know that I became more libertarian as I studied logic more and more. Also I know a professor of logic who’s a libertarian and not only that, but we see that computer scientists are also well trained in logic -hmmm, logic seems to be the middle term if you will, that connects all these groups together. True?
Bastiat was famously concerned with the consistency of political doctrines.