A Grumpy Computer Scientist
2 min readJan 5, 2022

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First of all, I sincerely thank you for correcting my arguments, I will certainly keep you in mind in the future if I ever write a serious, formal paper that I need checked for validity and soundness ;)

You are right that even if the conversation here is what it is, intelligent people should aspire to elevate the standard as best as they can. You do a great job of it, I read some of your articles and I appreciate them.

While I admit, As I will explain later, that my argument was not necessarily designed to be formally correct, I still think that your examination of it is - in turn - a poor argument. Particularly,

1. it is centered on your chosen form of libertarianism. I say something that is true of some libertarians and you comment that it is not true of all libertarians. But I never argued or meant to argue for that. That would be impossible, because nothing is true of all libertarians, since their positions are all over the place, going to anarco-communist to basically just corporato-fascist, and often internally contradictory.

2. you base your argument on what is common where you live, which I assume is the US. Typical. not all the world is the US. Most libertarians over here are not those you have over there, and dare I say, are a somewhat more sensible.

3. i wasn't trying to make a formal argument, but to counter the preposterous notion that the law of the jungle loved by libertarians would benefit them.

At least some libertarians are definitely against the government enforcing private contracts, which was what was being discussed. Therefore not my argument but your counter is wrong.

Here

https://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1236&context=fs

and here

https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/voluntary-contract-enforcement

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A Grumpy Computer Scientist

UK-based AI professor interested in AI, mind, science, rationality, digital culture and innovation. Hobbies: incessantly fighting nonsense.