[FRIAM] “Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

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Interesting. We hear from righties like Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro all the time how postmodernists' "relativism" is diluting our culture and sending us on the path to Hell. Is this such a relativism? 

I'm reminded of the "all sides" fallacy or the snowflake idea that any arbitrary opinion of any arbitrary person is just as "valid" as any other opinion of any other person. I blame psychotherapy. >8^D Nobody's ever *wrong*. We all just have different points of view! And we all deserve trophies just for participating.

Last week the concept of a broken clock being "right" twice per day came up. This highlights, I think, the differences between a) validity vs. soundness, b) descriptive vs. mechanistic models, and c) correlation vs. causation. The broken clock is *not* accurate twice per day. The clock is THE canonical mechanism. A "stopped clock" is almost self-contradictory. If it's stopped, it's not a clock.

So, no. Sure, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels may be a valid view, in some unhinged yet logical fantasy. But it is *NOT* a sound, sensible, or rational view, any more than a stopped clock is right twice per day. Had it been written in, say, 1950, I might be more generous.

On 5/20/21 10:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> But there are other valid views of the world too, for example The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein.
> Neither is right or wrong, it simply represents different valid views. 

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