Dave, if you quoted outside the quote box, then you wouldn’t have to bold your text, and people could quote you. Or is not quoting you the desired effect in discussion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic). Basically all you’re saying with those 3 points is that if you make a mistake you are wrong. Fair enough. If you made a mistake like this, your theories would no longer be tautological.
Tautologic: follows from the definition of the things
Actually they say a socialist state will probably spend money on things other than what citizens would have bought with their own money. It is technically possible to guess what your citizens would purchase and for the state to mimic the market. This is actually a point of contention i have with the calculation problem; while I do believe it demonstrates the practical impossibility of central planning, I do not believe it is an a priori argument against the state. I think you grasp this point too when you say “the odds are excellent that no one will get what they want”.
You mean a boom founded on malinvestments will become a bust once those malinvestments become obvious. Again, it follows from basic praxeologic method.
etc etc
The point i was trying to make was that mainstream economists just sit around predicting that the recession will be over in 6.7 months. Austrians realize that equations are bullox and don’t mess around with positivism.
They are wrong. It will not bring any more rain.
What reason do they have dancing will work better than a goat sacrifice or whatever?
Which is what a raindance is.
now show how being mistaken is exactly the same as being irrational. purleeze.
This is the key line: “Tautologic: follows from the definition of the things.”
We got caught up in semantics. If you use tautologic in that sense of course you are right.
I thought you meant it in a much more technical sense. The point of the long previous post was to show that a tautology in that narrower sense does not spare one from errors.
Most people don’t seem to have the appreciation for semantics 
Knowledge of the world is not perfect.
If we believed that eating an apple a day will make us immune to cardiac disease, and we wish to prevent cardiac disease, we will probably eat an apple a day. The truth might be that eating an apple a day will prevent 99% of cardiac disease and not 100%. Would it be irrational to eat an apple a day to prevent cardiac disease if you believed that it prevented it 100%? Or would it be irrational because it only prevented it 99% of the time and and what you believed was found to be not absolutely true but you were unaware of this knowledge.
Most of the time, when my remote control is missing, it is under the couch. In this case, it is not under the couch, but somewhere else. Would it be irrational to check under the couch first?
As for rain dancing: they think dancing in such a way will increase the chance of rain, so they do it. As for the remote: statistically, there is a high likelihood that it is under the couch, so I check under the couch.
Essentially, there is a rationale behind all action.
If you are ignorant to the relative ineffectivity of raindancing to goat sacrifice, then you’d be dancing to bring about rain. If the reverse is true, you’d be sacrificing goats to get to the same end.
If technology at your disposal is at a level, that raindance, or whatever, is the only known way to increase rain, then, of course, you’ll be dancing to bring rain. Why? Because you’re an rational actor.
Yes, raindance is a way to bring rain. So it is a means to bring about an end. Utilizing it is a rational act.
It’s not a functional way to bring rain, as you and I know, but this is not something that can be known without any prior knowledge of technology and natural sciences.
Nonsense. Rationality means you realize that sacrifices don’t work.
sadly juan that is not correct. unfortunately the capacity of humans to reason about the means at their disposal and how they might be used to achieve their ends does not confer on them perfect knowledge of all earthly matters.
if people must have perfect knowledge of all possible facts in order to a) never be mistaken and b) to be rational (i.e. never be irrational by the opinions offered here by those opposed to Mises’ definition about what irrationality means.)
as we all lack such knowledge therefore we are all ‘irrational’ and where is rationality to be found ? in who? when?
obviously this is a problem of conflating knowledge with reason.
That’s a discovery that leads to new and better technology - or at the very least, rejection of wasteful processes, like raindancing.
In order to warm a house, people used to use coal. Coal is a dirty and rather ineffective means of heating. After technological discoveries other, better, means of heating were created, and the use of coal as a way of heating was rejected. Were people irrational in using coal for heating? They saw that by burning coal they gained heat. In similar fashion, a primitive man sees the rains arriving after the ritual of raindance. Thus, of coarse, the rain results from the dance.
Only after you’ve gained such knowledge of the natural world as to irrefutably disregard raindance as waste, it is not irrational to utilize it, as it was not irrational to use coal for heat before the, to us, obvious handicaps of coal usage were made apparent, and other means of heating were created.
It has less to do with what you think is right, and more to do with what means do they think will get them a desired result.
What you’re suggesting, from what I can tell, is that “this is the best method, so it is the rational method to reach an end”
Well what happens if there is an even better method that is yet undiscovered? Does that mean that if there are better methods for everything that we do, than all our actions are irrational?
No, it doesn’t. Which is why you and I and others (liburne, zefreak et al) keep going in circles in some debates.
Rationality is simply acting towards an end within the boundaries of your knowledge. A baby crying is rational behaviour given the limited capacity for a baby to express itself, and to interact with the environment and individuals around it.
Sorry, Mises definition of rationality, is just, well, Mises’ arbitrary and misleading definition of rationality. Of course, individuals can try to redefine words, but that’s not how language works.
Also, the issue is not ‘perfect knowledge’ but ordinary reason. Realizing that sacrifices don’t cause rain does not entail ‘perfect knowledge’, but it does entail rational thought.
Not on my part.
Also, some tautologies are especially useless. If some people want to argue…
- Smith believes that sacrifices cause rain i[/i]
- So it’s ‘rational’ for him to try to use sacrifices to cause rain.
…fine. However, Smith is a ‘rational actor’ only partially. He uses a means he thinks is right, but the means is actually wrong, and so is he. He’s not taking a rational look at reality, he’s just following irrational religious dogma (in this case).
Well, that may be the definition of rationality used by the austrian cult of subjectivism…
It’s nice to see you making so many concessions today. It’s long overdue.
I made no concession.
Mises definition is fit for the task, the task of praxeology. agreed its not common usage, but most technical fields need to chisel the meanings of the words they use with more precision and with various implications even when those same words appear in broader common usage. Do you complain that Mises definition of ‘action’ (human action) is arbitrary and misleading and wrong too? it does deviate from the everyday meaning of ‘action’…
This is the issue more than simply being wrong. Being wrong or just not omnipotent does not make one irrational. It is that the choice of action is completely arbitrary, that there is no reason or argument given why act one way as opposed to any other way.