Honestly, unless you have expensive hobbies you are passionate about, if you have enough money then you should shift your focus away from money and more towards finding happiness in your life.
There's nothing wrong with making lots of money, if you're also happy with what you're doing. But if you think you'd be happier doing something more worthwhile, then go for it. It doesn't have to be medical research. You could work on developing tools that support scientific development - things like programming tools or machine learning technology. You can still make a lot of money in those areas. You don't even have to focus on science, there is intrinsic value in politics, art, culture, education, communication, etc. Or sell everything, keep as much as you need to set yourself up doing something you enjoy and give the rest to cancer research.
Whatever you want to do, just making money for its own sake doesn't make any sense from a pragmatic point of view.
Once you've ensured a stable modest lifestyle, extra money does not really increase your ability to enjoy life significantly. I am not very rich, but I have learned to cook, and I cook to my own tastes. So I get really great food every day.
Alcohol is pretty cheap if that's your pleasure. Drugs less so - but spending a lot of money on drugs is bad for you in the long term.
Having money helps attract sexual interest, but confidence and social skills work just as well. Money only helps get more frequent lower quality sex. High quality comes through deep mutual understanding and accommodation with you partner. You're way better off spending time investing in personal development so you can learn to build good quality relationships.
The one thing money can reliably buy you is status. It's very easy to cling to the notion that status has significant intrinsic value, but it doesn't. Status doesn't help you make friends or find love or solve your emotional problems or be happier. You might think having low status will make people ignore you or look down on you, but if you're confident, if you believe in yourself as a smart guy, that will never happen. True self-belief renders status obsolete.
Money based status is ultimately just a social competition that some people care about and some people don't. It's a shared obsession that means about as much as any other shared obsession. Your bank balance is like a high score on World of Warcraft. To some people it's the most important thing to them. But, to those on the outside, it's obvious that the obsession is unhealthy and adds little to the obsessed one's life.
There are two differences. The first is that you have to replace "preconceived notions of how the universe works" with "vast body of experimental data and scientific understanding of how the universe works". Our evidence for how physics works vastly outweighs current parapsychology research results. The second difference is that the evidence is not being ignored (at least by the author of the article), but is being taken to indicate a real effect, it just isn't the effect of psychic powers. Our knowledge of physics means that the existence of psychic powers is given a much lower prior probability than the possibility of widespread experimental error and bias. Since both explanations are likely to produce slight positive results, the existence of psychic powers is still unlikely once you take the evidence into account.
However, the important point in the article is that in order to make this inference in an intellectually honest way, you need to significantly increase your estimation for the probabilities of widespread experimental error in ALL scientific studies that use similar methods. Since the methods in parapsychology are pretty good, this has quite a far reaching effect.
In a sense, your question about "on what grounds can people claim one field to be nonsense but not others?" is exactly the same question asked by the author. Except the author isn't implying that parapsychology isn't nonsense, they are implying that many other fields are nonsense too. This makes sense because physics is almost certainly not nonsense.
The argument being made is that employers have a lot more market power in the employment market than potential employees. Employers have capital, they have inertia so they can absorb a lot more risk. There are fewer employers than employees so it is easy for them to form a cartel or engage in price fixing. This especially goes for low end jobs, where a small number of large corporations make up much of the retail and fast food market. Unemployed individuals are under a lot of pressure to find employment quickly, and they know there is a lot of competition. So, employers can set wages artificially low. This power is not absolute, which explains why not every job is at minimum wage. However, this is an observable effect. The gap between rich and poor is ever widening, the middle class is eroding away, yet all the while production has been increasing. Wages are being driven down artificially low.
I wanted to ask "where does it all end?" but then I realised from the rest of your comment, you actually seem okay with slavery. Which is odd really, because you argue about human rights, but the right to freedom of movement is actually a far more fundamental and clear cut human right than the right to form contracts and do trade. In fact, if your ideals about the right to form contracts result in other people losing their right to freedom of movement, then that's a clear sign that you have lost your way.
The "gap" between the rich and poor is a function of possible productivity. As it becomes possible for people to do more, there will be more of a spread between people who do nothing and people who max out their potential. When all farmers worked farmed by hand, the "gap" between the lazy and the industrious was a few bushels of food. But now that there are tractors and financing available, the top farmers produce maybe thousands of times more than the little farmers.
The situation is similar in every field, especially those involving mass distributions. An interesting youtube video can get millions of times more views than an ordinary video. Is this a problem? Should we force people to watch uninteresting videos, or cap the interesting videos to reduce the viewing gap?
I don't see why increased productivity should be a concern, especially since being productive today generally means imparting benefits to large numbers of people. Larry Page is very rich, but he got that way by helping everybody with an internet connection to find useful information.
> . . . the middle class is eroding away, yet all the while production has been increasing. Wages are being driven down artificially low.
I don't understand what you mean by "artificially low" wages. Wages are generally set by supply and demand. As long as people are free to choose alternatives, they are not working for artificially low wages. An example of people with artificially low wages are prisoners who must take the work offered to them by prison officials. But the majority of people are not in prison.
> you actually seem okay with slavery
I'm all for stamping out slavery where it is committed by one person against another. No one should take away another's right to contract. But where a person voluntarily degrades himself, I see that as his choice, not mine.
> the right to freedom of movement is actually a far more fundamental and clear cut human right than the right to form contracts and do trade.
I agree that freedom of movement is a fundamental right. I'm not sure if it's more important that the right to contract or trade. I think it's less fundamental because there are a few situations where you could legitimately not have freedom of movement (while traveling in an airplane or trespassing), but I can think of very few situations where you wouldn't have the right to contract. (You might have contracted away your right to make future contracts for a limited time and subject-matter.)
Slavery is immoral because it takes away freedom of movement (and is thus a form of imprisonment), not freedom to create contracts. There are no fundamentally fixed moral rights relating to trade because there is no universal objective notion of property. Property is an entirely social concept and can only exist through social contract. You only "own" an object to the extent that everyone else agrees you do.
Most people want there to be regulation of business, even if some of it is corrupt and inefficient. Most people want governments to collect taxes and control shared resources, even if this is inefficient and wasteful. These things are seen as a necessary evil. If it's what the public want, then it's not immoral, because the entire notion of property (and by extension trade) only exists as a social contract.
To go into detail for your taxi example, the roads were built as part of a social contract where people pay taxes under the expectation that the government will execute some form of transport policy. Tax payers would have anticipated some form of taxi regulation to occur over future roads. For most people this is desirable because they want to be protected as consumers. If you take away taxi regulation, then you are not honouring the implicit contract that allowed for the creation of the roads.
You may personally disagree with this widespread desire for regulation. It is also reasonable to say that corrupt and inefficient regulation is immoral. However I think it is quite dangerous to argue that regulation itself is fundamentally immoral. The history of the industrial revolution shows what kinds of contracts ordinary people will willingly subject themselves to if they feel they have to.
> Slavery is immoral because it takes away freedom of movement . . .
Here's a counter-example: the difference between a freeman farmer and a slave farmer is not that they don't have freedome of movement, but that the freeman has the right to sell the harvest to whom he wants while the slave does not.
It sounds like the definition of slavery as lack of freedom of movement was dreamed up by some law professor in order to avoid having to characterize the income tax as a form of slavery.
Reminds me of the definition of pornography: you know it when you see it. Or Plato's man: an upright biped without feathers. Somebody plucked a chicken and said "Plato's man!". So he added "with broad nails".
Any time you try to create a minimal taxonomy you get into games like this. No malicious intent by theoretical law professors need be imagined.
It doesn't necessarily imply that the electorate is uneducated and easily swayed. I think it's more likely that most of the time these elections are a close call and campaigning sways people who are in the middle or motivates people who might not otherwise vote.
The argument basically just implies that advertising has some influence. Which is true - even for an educated and informed audience. Nothing you do to the electorate can make them immune to advertising. So money will always be a motivation for politicians. Especially since extra campaign money can always be spent on all kinds of fun expenses, and giving well paying jobs to friends and family.
Also, bear in mind that even the most well informed educated electorate has a very limited feedback mechanism. Many people care so strongly about particular issues that they will never change their vote. Which means people in the middle ground only really get to choose between the two main political parties. In practise, it works out a bit like a price fixing cartel. Basically both parties take turns screwing everyone over. Candidates only have to make the appearance of being better than the last guy during election time. During their last term they can do whatever they want, which sets the bar really low for the next guy. It's a race to the bottom.
As long as the influence of money is present, politicians will behave as corruptly as they can get away with. Improving the education level of the electorate reduces the amount politicians can get away with, but because of the two party system, they'll always be able to get away with a lot.
You mean restrict who can vote? The public wouldn't go for it. Which is good, because if people were okay with having their right to vote taken away, we'd be in a much bigger mess.
It's perfectly possible to learn to change your ideas and continue to learn and adapt over time well into adulthood. Not everyone does it, but I pursue personal growth and learning, and consequentially change quite a lot from year to year. I would happily commit to change and adaptation in order to live for thousands of years. I don't think I need death to give me urgency. If anything, thinking about my mortality tends to reduce my motivation.
I find the idea that an infinite living "me" would not be "me" very strange. It's like saying that if you keep adding fuel to a fire, once the original fuel has burned away it's no longer the same fire. My mind is a dynamic process, even if it changes state, it's still a continuation of the same process.
Ultimately, the ideas and urgency of ordinary human beings probably won't determine what happens to humanity in the long run. We're on course to develop powerful AI even with the technology and ideas we already have. Who knows what will happen then, but I think a stagnated immortal human race is a very unlikely outcome.
nemesisj's comment - "Tesla is probably in the right here, but their response to threats tends be heavy handed and defensive."
your comment - "Tesla is in the right, you are trolling. Snark."
I guess maybe you missed the point that Tesla can be the good guy in a lawsuit and still act in a way that seems unprofessional and worrying to a potential future customer.
To give you an example, if I pick something up at random, the probability that it is a shoe is at least as big as the probability that it is a red shoe. That's because it can't be a red shoe without also being a shoe. Same thing with the A's and B's. If A and B happen, then that means A happens.
The article discusses the NSA embedding themselves in the Huawei support infrastructure. If true, Huawei's access is being abused by individuals who work for both Huawei and the NSA. So, in order for the NSA to abuse Huawei's access in the way discussed in the article, then that requires Huawei employees to abuse Huawei's access. Hence,
P(NSA abuses H's access) <= P(H abuses H's access)
Nothing is assumed to be happening, that's why we're talking about probabilities. We are discussing the possibility that the NSA could be infiltrating and subverting the Huawei support infrastructure. That's what the article is about. We're not discussing whether or not the NSA directly hacked Huawei. While that is also a worrying piece of news, it isn't the same thing.
There's nothing wrong with making lots of money, if you're also happy with what you're doing. But if you think you'd be happier doing something more worthwhile, then go for it. It doesn't have to be medical research. You could work on developing tools that support scientific development - things like programming tools or machine learning technology. You can still make a lot of money in those areas. You don't even have to focus on science, there is intrinsic value in politics, art, culture, education, communication, etc. Or sell everything, keep as much as you need to set yourself up doing something you enjoy and give the rest to cancer research.
Whatever you want to do, just making money for its own sake doesn't make any sense from a pragmatic point of view. Once you've ensured a stable modest lifestyle, extra money does not really increase your ability to enjoy life significantly. I am not very rich, but I have learned to cook, and I cook to my own tastes. So I get really great food every day. Alcohol is pretty cheap if that's your pleasure. Drugs less so - but spending a lot of money on drugs is bad for you in the long term. Having money helps attract sexual interest, but confidence and social skills work just as well. Money only helps get more frequent lower quality sex. High quality comes through deep mutual understanding and accommodation with you partner. You're way better off spending time investing in personal development so you can learn to build good quality relationships.
The one thing money can reliably buy you is status. It's very easy to cling to the notion that status has significant intrinsic value, but it doesn't. Status doesn't help you make friends or find love or solve your emotional problems or be happier. You might think having low status will make people ignore you or look down on you, but if you're confident, if you believe in yourself as a smart guy, that will never happen. True self-belief renders status obsolete.
Money based status is ultimately just a social competition that some people care about and some people don't. It's a shared obsession that means about as much as any other shared obsession. Your bank balance is like a high score on World of Warcraft. To some people it's the most important thing to them. But, to those on the outside, it's obvious that the obsession is unhealthy and adds little to the obsessed one's life.