Something extremely common yet unsolved is the nature of disagreement on politics. Sure there are many verbal battles of wit and volume (neither of which validly illustrate a point) but these are not what I'm talking about.

Take two persons who both agree on what is ideal (IE: maximum happiness for everybody on earth. It's quite possible that many people agree on whatever definition of "ideal" yet disagree on which political party they belong to.

How can this be? This can only be if that person then thinks that he/she has some special calculational ability to solve the math problem of causing endorphines in humans. This problem would involve economics, personal affairs, and a million other interrelated issues. The average person can't do calculus mentally, there is no chance that he/she will be able to estimate economics and such well.

What would be a ideal would be if we would agree on statistics to use. When we agree on what is ideal we can then work our way to answer all political questions ( "free market", "human rights", "taxes", etc) by statistical means. For example one might deduce freedom of speech makes people happier in most cases but would deduce that allowing a person to shout fire in a crowded theatre would be inoptimal. This could be tested by statistics and so could the other issues.

Certainly these statistics wouldn't be 100% conclusive but it only need show a preference. If the statistics showed it was really close then it wouldn't matter that much to either of us. of course this could be expanded so that 100,000 people all decide based on 100 studies (which would have to be conducted by rational intelligent people and have to meet requirements)

It is a sad state of affairs when "that is unnatural" passes for a valid argument. All arguments must have a complete line of reasoning back to a given definition of ideal. Perhaps "That is unnatural, all unatural things are inefficient, inefficiency is not ideal." would be a valid line of reasoning were all the steps valid.

http://www.semanticreasoning.org

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