1. In using phenomenalism to check whether we’re using language meaningfully, there’s the problem of how we can be said to mean so much more than we ever actually think. For example, how can we be said to mean the whole range of color associated with the word “black” even though, practically speaking, we’d only think of a handful of particular shades when saying the word?
2. The answer is that the meaning of a word (1) isn’t to be found only in what’s immediately present—only in what’s immediately introspectable due to being present to the “mind’s eye”—(2) nor is it to be found even in the aggregate of all that’s been present or introspectable to the individual across time; instead, (3) it’s to be found in the group—in the aggregate of all that’s been present or introspectable to all of the individuals involved across time. If a language evolves a word, then that word is presumably a common-enough indifference range. If one individual asks for “coffee,” and then another individual gives them something different than what they actually thought of, but they’re nevertheless no less satisfied, then neither individual will find any reason to change to using a different word.

1. If you stimulate the economy, then some parts of the economy grow “bigger” at the expense of others growing “smaller.” Similarly, if you use a stimulant such as caffeine or nicotine, then some parts of the body (including some parts of the brain) grow “bigger” at the expense of others growing “smaller.” Stimulants, whether given to the economy or the body, don’t give extra resources; they only change the prioritization of the resources that are already there. But—and here I’ll let go of the economics analogy and talk only about health—that change in prioritization can grow some abilities at the expense of others. Rice, wheat, tea, coffee, and tobacco give me better mental performance for schizoautistic thought but my sexual performance doesn’t do as well. A diet of only meat, fish, and fruit, on the other hand, does the opposite for me: My sexual performance does well, but only at sacrifice of the great power of imagination needed to experience the world of books as if it’s right there in front of me. The here and now becomes more important than working “alongside” Hume, Mises, Hayek, Chomsky, and others.
2. “Taking” rice, wheat, tea, coffee, tobacco, and other drugs, drug-like foods, and drug-like drinks, is analogous to taking steroids. It’s undeniable that steroids make you stronger (despite not actually giving you any extra resources to work with), and it’s undeniable that in some sports not taking steroids puts you at a disadvantage. Some professional sports are such that you’d be inevitably selected out of the top of the sport unless you take the health risk. Caffeine, nicotine, and other nootropics are similar: If you care too much about your health to take the risk, then you’ll be at an intellectual disadvantage. You’ll be inevitably selected out of the top of the intellectual world.
3. Eating only meat, fish, and fruit, with everything being raw, would be ideal for physical health and performance. Doing so would be also be ideal for a kind of mental well-roundedness. Adding wheat, coffee, and other civilization-building psychoactives to that diet, then, would make for less robust physical health and performance but as a deal with the devil: You’d change your balance of mental abilities, becoming less well-rounded; some mental abilities would grow out of all proportion with others. If your presets are intellectual—which, incidentally, is true for both of us—then you’d become a better intellectual at the expense of becoming worse at everything else.

In modeling the regularity in human action or the human mind: It’s possible to (1) think in terms of an individual as part of a group. For example, you can say: “Japanese people are honest, and Mr. Takahashi is Japanese. Therefore, Mr. Takahashi is honest.” It’s also possible to (2) think in terms of the individual alone. You can say, simply: “Mr. Takahashi is honest.”

Interestingly, both of those ways of modeling regularity are such that the resulting propositions can feel suffocating. To use an example from my own life: As a white American who spends a lot of time in Japan, I find it frustrating when a Japanese person assumes that I’ll think or act in a certain way just because I’m a “foreigner.” Whether what’s attributed is positive or negative, it feels like being boxed in arbitrarily; my personality isn’t just an outgrowth of my nationality or race. But it can also feel suffocating even when the purported regularity is thought of as an outgrowth of you as a unique individual. Consider: If you want to put your past behind you, move on from it, and invent yourself anew, then most radical, and thus most useful in that regard, would be to move somewhere new and cut all of your old ties to the people from your past. The people around you knowing what kind of person that you’ve been up until now can trap you into staying like that indefinitely. Moving somewhere new can get you out of that trap.

If you model a person as part of a group, then you challenge their free will to deviate from the past pattern of action of the people in that group. You bind their future to the past of others. And even if you model the person as a unique individual, then you do the same thing, just according to their own past rather than the past of others.

Thus, any attempt at scientific description of the regularity in human action or the human mind is easily taken as suffocating to free will, i.e. binding of the future of action to the past.

1. To most Japanese people, a person who looks American is expected to be an “English-only extravert.” Thus, when a Japanese person goes out of their way talk to an American-looking person—well, at least a person who looks American to them—the selection bias is such that the Japanese person is likely to be looking for a stereotypically American interaction. Exemplified here is the general principle that outward signals of the kind of person that you are inwardly, whether choosable or unchoosable outward signals, bring into your awareness, systematically, the kind of people whose expectations would be disappointed if you’re not stereotypical in the regard expected. Being white or black; these aren’t choosable outward signals. If you’re a white or black introvert who can speak Japanese, then in Japan you’ll constantly run into Japanese people who are surprised or even disappointed unless you pretend that you’re somebody that you’re not. Your look pulls them in, but then what you’re actually like is unrelated to that.
2. Expectation is thus turned into social pressure, for the kind of people who want you to fulfill the expectation will be (1) pulled into interacting with you and (2) disappointed if you don’t fulfill that expectation, and the kind of people who don’t want you to fulfill that expectation won’t be pulled into interacting with you; the latter kind of people will be by default more hidden to your awareness than the former.
3. Words like “white,” “black,” “American,” “Japanese,” “man,” and “woman” can be charged with more or less identity, but words like “lightning” and “thunder” can’t. It would be useful to have separate terminology, e.g. (1) “man” as identity-laden and “adult male” as identity-free, (2) “Scotsman” as identity-laden but “adult male born and raised in Scotland” or “adult male with a Scottish passport” as identity-free.
4. Interestingly, a lot of the language used among feminists and in social justice involves stripping away the identity, e.g. “people with a cervix” as opposed to “women.”

The scientific or rational approach is one of pure description—insofar as that ideal is even possible—with any prescriptions being included only when laid bare as the descriptions that they must ultimately be. For example, when thinking scientifically or rationally it’s perfectly reasonable to give an argument of the following logical form: “X causes Y. You want Y. Therefore, you should also want X.” Whether X actually causes Y, and whether you actually want Y, are separate questions; they’re questions that can be debated. What’s important to emphasize here is simply that science doesn’t hide value judgments but puts them out in the open for all to see. You can describe a person’s value judgments, and in some cases you may even be able to tell them something about their value judgments that they’re not already consciously aware of. But science always does its best to untangle judgments of value from beliefs in cause and effect. The ideal of science is to offer propositions only in an ultimately purely descriptive way, whether or not any prescriptions are in turn logically implied.

That is, scientific propositions are always perspective-neutral in their formulation, though it’s of course possible for each person to plug in their own value judgments and then in effect get advice on what to do.

To be clear: It’s not that the scientific approach doesn’t let you tell people what they should do. It’s just that the scientific approach lays bare the logical steps of the argument; it untangles value from belief. It doesn’t preach: “Do X, for X is right and good.” Instead, it says (much more nihilistically than any preacher would): “If you want Y, then you should do X.” Science is a tool, and like any other tool it’s itself agnostic about what people use it for. More concretely, science is analogous to a knife in that, e.g., a chef can use a knife to cut an onion, yes, but a mugger can also use that same knife for a much different purpose.

1. Mises and Chomsky both thought of the “unfreeness of the mind” as the same across people. This “unfreeness” is much of what both of them spent their careers—one of them in economics and the other in linguistics—thinking and writing about.
2. That is: On the doctrine of the physical may be unfree but the mental is certainly free, both Mises and Chomsky made the (seemingly!) controversial move of saying: “No, the mental is no less unfree. But that unfreeness is the same for all people.” Those constraints on the mind are what they both analyzed: Both Mises and Chomsky analyzed what they thought of as the fundamental and unchangeable structure of the human mind. They looked into what necessarily delimits our powers as human beings, what necessarily constrains our minds in a way analogous to the physical laws constraining our physical bodies. The move here is: “The mental is no less unfree. But that’s not dangerous to say because that unfreeness is the same for all people. It’s the humanity that we all share.“
3. Actually, Mises talked about some of the differences between the male and female minds in his book Socialism. Chomsky, a much more thoroughgoing leftist in this respect, wouldn’t have done that.
4. There’s human nature, which both Mises and Chomsky were comfortable investigating. But there’s also the nature of the male mind vs. the nature of the female mind. And beyond sex, there’s also race. Mises talked about sexual difference but not racial difference; Chomsky talked about neither.
5. It may be worth looking into how Kant influenced both Mises and Chomsky.
6. Some attributes are (relatively) changeable, e.g. fashion. You can just put on a different shirt. Others are (relatively) changeable, e.g. sex, race.
7. In American culture, you’re supposed to draw attention only to the most changeable of attributes. While an American may say something like “I like your shirt,” a Japanese person may instead say something like 鼻が高いですね. It’s a lot easier to change your shirt than your 鼻.
8. In some cultures, being masculine is thought of as “becoming” of an adult male and being feminine is thought of as “becoming” of an adult female. To get to the general principle: Your role in the social order—and this is true of any traditional or conservative culture—is a function of certain (relatively) immutable characteristics. You just find yourself to be an adult male, which is a physical fact about you (that’s not easily changeable); the culture then expects masculinity out of you, which is a mental way of being. Identities bundle the changeable and the unchangeable, the malleable and the unmalleable, together; an adult male is expected to be masculine, and in the image of the archetypal masculine-adult-male of a culture is found the culture’s image of a “man,” of “manhood.”
9. An identity, for it to have any kind of social effect (and in its social effect is found its only effect, of course), must present with some kind of “visible” manifestation, e.g. wearing a suit rather than something else, being one race rather than another. Some identity-related signals, then, are choosable; others are unchoosable.
10. The more traditional or conservative a culture, the more the culture expects that you’ll combine certain choosable identity-related signals with certain unchoosable ones.
11. If you dress a certain way, talk a certain way, etc., then people will “expect” of you certain other things as well. And this “expectation,” with its description-prescription ambiguity, turns prediction into social pressure. It’s possible, though, to use this to your advantage: If you signal in a certain way, thus giving people information about what you’re likely to be like or do, then you in effect give yourself motivation to live up to those expectations. For example, if you dress and talk like an intellectual, then you’ll disappoint people unless you live up to the expectations of an intellectual.
12. That is: Identity—well, insofar as identity is choosable, for some of identity is unchoosable—is about giving people information about what kind of person you are in order to use to your advantage the phenomenon of description-prescription ambiguity, i.e. in order to harness the phenomenon of people expecting things of you starting out as dry prediction but ending up as motivationally useful social pressure to live up to those expectations. Modern American culture, being anti-traditionalist/conservative, plays up the choosable, and plays down the unchoosable, as much as possible.
13. If you take on an identity willingly, then you pigeonhole yourself into the exact place that you want to be.
14. It’s possible to argue about identity in that what, e.g., a man “is,” depends on the question of what attributes would be most useful when embodied in an adult male.
15. Modern Western culture is such that it’s not the “form” of the person, but the “substance,” that’s important. We all have inside of us, deep down, our own unique spark of consciousness or sentience. We all have inside of us something unique to us as an individual, something worth protecting.
16. Why is it that interpreting the proposition “no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” such that “Scotsman” is an identity results in a feeling of prescriptiveness? The answer is: Being included in a group that you’re supposed to be included in feels good, and being excluded from such a group feels bad. To continue with the above example, and to be concrete: An adult male born and raised in Scotland is expected to have the identity of a Scotsman. In fact, that’s why “Scotsman” is in its meaning ambiguous between the relatively “hard” facts, which are all but socially unnegotiable (e.g., whether you have a Scottish passport), and the relatively “soft” facts, which are much more socially negotiable (e.g., whether you have inside of you the national spirit of Scotland). If you have the “hard” side, in that you have a Scottish passport, but not the “soft,” then you’re a Scot in the statistics, sure, but you’re not a real Scot, you’re not a Scot in spirit.
17. It’s possible to identify differently than you’re identified as. For example, a person may identify as a man even though most of the people around them would identify them as a woman.
18. To identify as X is to take on the role of X, not only outwardly, in your action, but also inwardly, in your thought. And to be identified as X is to be encouraged to take on the role of X.
19. Identity is a two-way negotiation. If a person decides to identify as X, then the people around them can decide to accept or reject that identity. For example, the identity “Japanese” is not only linguistic and cultural but also racial. If a white person, even a white person born and raised in Japan, identifies as “Japanese,” then they’ll almost always be rejected. Interestingly, and this gets into the difference between Japan as a traditional or conservative nation and America as being the opposite: The linguistic and the cultural are choosable, at least to some extent—even a person who wasn’t born and raised in a certain sociolinguistic system can immerse in that sociolinguistic system and end up passing as a native—but the racial is unchoosable. In Japan, identity is more likely to be an inextricable mixture of the choosable and the unchoosable. Japan gives people roles, which are changeable, based on their race and other unchangeable attributes. America, on the other hand, doesn’t like doing that: Anybody, regardless of their race or any of their other unchangeable attributes, can be or become an American, in fact can be or become anything.
20. Another angle: In the aforementioned two-way negotiation of identity, who does the culture give priority to? The person who says what their identity is, or the people around them who agree or disagree?
21. In a traditional or conservative nation: A person born male is supposed to grow up and become a man, and a person born female has the opposite destiny, i.e. to grow up and become a woman. Anything outside of those two boxes is rejected out of hand. Sex determines gender; the immutable, and essential, determines the immutable. You won’t be accepted as a feminine male or a masculine female any more than you’d be accepted as a white Japanese person. On the other hand, in a progressive or liberal nation: The immutable doesn’t matter as much. Whether you’re one sex or another, or one race or another, you can decide on any identity or role that you want. It’s only your propensities and talents as an individual that matter.