The Axiom of Choice

[pvn]

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It is simply my position that it is absurd to assume that people can simply "decide" what is best for them.

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But it's more absurd for anyone else to assume that they can decide what's best for other people.

Do people make bad decisions sometimes? Yes, duh.

Does that mean someone else should make all the decisions for them? No.

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What you "want" I cannot decide for you. What is "best" for you is another thing entirely.

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You can't decide that, either.

[Borodog]

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Interesting talk by Barry Schwartz.

I don't want to say much because it would be better to just go into without any preconcpetions, but I think this adresses some very fundamental issues with regards to capitalism.

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The market already automagically limits choices to those that people actually choose. People didn't choose the Edsel. The next year, it was not included amongst the list of choices.

Voila.

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You obviously have understood roughly 0% of this thread. Read and try again please.

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You linked to a talk that, presumably given the context of the discussion, trots out the old argument that too many choices are somehow bad for consumers. I merely pointed out that the market automatically limits the number of choices.

[plzleenowhammy]

It is simply my position that it is absurd to assume that people can simply "decide" what is best for them.

This seems like a childhood issue. Your parents deciding what was best for you and you now think that noone can decide for themselves.

[Zygote]

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Have you read about the iterative prisoner's dilemma?

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Of course, but that has nothing to do with this because life is not an iterated game.

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since you're the one making an extravagant point here, care to provide an explanation?

[Dan.]

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Have you read about the iterative prisoner's dilemma?

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Of course, but that has nothing to do with this because life is not an iterated game.

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since you're the one making an extravagant point here, care to provide an explanation?

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What I believe he's trying to say is: take the Prisoner's Dilemma. We both confess because it's our dominant strategy, and we both end up in prison for life. Because you only get one chance at life, we aren't able to go back in time and cooperate with one another to both not-confess and reach a mutually beneficial outcome.

Ergo, life is not iterative. You only get to play once.

[Brainwalter]

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Have you read about the iterative prisoner's dilemma?

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Of course, but that has nothing to do with this because life is not an iterated game.

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since you're the one making an extravagant point here, care to provide an explanation?

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What I believe he's trying to say is: take the Prisoner's Dilemma. We both confess because it's our dominant strategy, and we both end up in prison for life. Because you only get one chance at life, we aren't able to go back in time and cooperate with one another to both not-confess and reach a mutually beneficial outcome.

Ergo, life is not iterative. You only get to play once.

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Of course that has nothing to do with this because life isn't a binary game that consists of one decision and one outcome.

[Zygote]

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Have you read about the iterative prisoner's dilemma?

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Of course, but that has nothing to do with this because life is not an iterated game.

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since you're the one making an extravagant point here, care to provide an explanation?

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What I believe he's trying to say is: take the Prisoner's Dilemma. We both confess because it's our dominant strategy, and we both end up in prison for life. Because you only get one chance at life, we aren't able to go back in time and cooperate with one another to both not-confess and reach a mutually beneficial outcome.

Ergo, life is not iterative. You only get to play once.

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this is just taking advantage of the ambiguity of the word "life". Clearly we are discussing choices and these are iterative. Life is an iterated game in the sense that the subset functions that compose life occur iteratively. Further, its an iterated game since lives are coming and going from generation to generation and society is clearly moving in certain directions due to the compounded decisions over time.

In your example, the prisoner still has opportunities to cooperate just not for the exact same case. The society uninvolved in these cases can also sense the results of others non-cooperation and may react.

Regardless, if you view the issue on a broader scale you can also see that in the long run of the variety of human decisions those who are cooperating clearly maximize their benefits, thereby surviving more so, and increase the incentives for others to do the same while simultaneously discouraging non-cooperation.

[valtaherra]

You have been conflating "knowing what I want", "knows what is best for me", and "the freedom to decide what my best interests are".

1) Clearly no other individual can know what I want.

2) Clearly others with highly specialized skillsets (medicine, law) have a much better idea of what is best for me in their fields (theyre hardly right all of the time, though)

3) Clearly no one else has any legitimate right to coercively interfere in my life based on either claiming to know what I want better than I do (Barry) or claiming to know what is best for me, regardless of if its true or not.

Barry disagrees with both 1 and 3. Barry knows what I want, and he'll hold a gun to my head to take away my property in order to restrict my choices (because he knows I want less choices). Actually, the sniveling turd would never hold a gun to my head, but he would gladly authorize others to do his dirty work.

[xorbie]

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But it's more absurd for anyone else to assume that they can decide what's best for other people.

Do people make bad decisions sometimes? Yes, duh.

Does that mean someone else should make all the decisions for them? No.

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Find me one single place where I said people should make your decisions for you. Please do. I'll be waiting. Perhaps exiting your paranoid life view in which every challenge to anything at all you believe in is automatically perceived as an attack on your complete autonomy.

[xorbie]

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You have been conflating "knowing what I want", "knows what is best for me", and "the freedom to decide what my best interests are".

1) Clearly no other individual can know what I want.

2) Clearly others with highly specialized skillsets (medicine, law) have a much better idea of what is best for me in their fields (theyre hardly right all of the time, though)

3) Clearly no one else has any legitimate right to coercively interfere in my life based on either claiming to know what I want better than I do (Barry) or claiming to know what is best for me, regardless of if its true or not.

Barry disagrees with both 1 and 3. Barry knows what I want, and he'll hold a gun to my head to take away my property in order to restrict my choices (because he knows I want less choices). Actually, the sniveling turd would never hold a gun to my head, but he would gladly authorize others to do his dirty work.

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Thank you for making it clear you aren't worth my time.