The Erosion of Free Will: Why Society's Loss of Belief in Freedom Is Dangerous

This could have been a lot better. Good premise but the author seems to want to make some relatively unsupported points rather than digging into some real interesting questions within the premise.

The piece missing to me was that they basically ignore psychology. They allude to people in SV saying 'of course we don't have free will' but kinda miss the reason why people say that: because we can prove that in certain circumstances where we think we have free well we don't really, whereas we can't prove in any circumstances that we do.

Sure this article is not supposed to be about 'do we have free will' and instead about the implications of how much we believe we have free will, but you can't really come to conclusions about that without wading into the messy world of 'what if we just have some free will'. And I don't see the author doing that.

I think the question of free will is irrelevant from the perspective of a government. The relevant question is whether a government can modify the behaviors of people by manipulating systems of incentives and punishments. This can be empirically tested, and the answer is clearly yes. All governments on every corner of the world do it in one form or another.

If there are no punishments for not paying taxes, then few will pay. If there are harsh punishments, then most will pay. This is common sense. Whether or not a thing called 'free will' plays a roll simply doesn't matter.

I didn’t use the word “progressive.” I only used the word “reactionary.”

I’m not interested in an argument about “Whig history,” because this isn’t a house party. It’s a comment chain on a tech forum where the originating post doesn’t even do us the dignity of substantiating itself: it just proudly assumes that we all know these things, and that we’re all going to agree with the author if we can just pay attention for long enough and get over the “ick” factor.

That isn’t moral reasoning, of the kind you’re talking about with the Good. It’s just a sneaky way to say “we all know I’m right.”

That's a mess of an article. It confuses "free will" and "freedom".

"Free will" is an internal issue within brains. "Freedom" is about what you can do before some external constraint stops you. Confusing the two does not help.

On the free will side, there are various technical arguments. One science fiction author has one of his robots, asked about free will by a human, say that they have a random number generator, and that's the same thing. There's also the paradox of Buridan's Ass, having to choose between two equally attractive alternatives and getting stuck.[1] That turns out to be related to the arbiter problem, where two requests for the same resource at "the same time" have to be resolved. It's a theorem that resolving such conflicts cannot be done in a bounded time, and hardware to do it has to allow for occasional delays while something in a metastable state settles. The non-technical concept is trying to decide who wins with rock-paper-scissors. If both parties offer the same value, you have to try again. With retries, the odds of getting a decision keep improving. But there's no number you can say is always enough.

There are psychology experiments which indicate that the explanation for a decision is generated after the decision is made.

On the "freedom" side, there's much political exploitation of the term, on both sides. Not going to go there today. The Economist had a cover article on this recently.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Buridan%27s_ass

I'm saying that quantum physics basically gives you an RNG, and you cannot build meaningful free will in the sense that people believe in by adding an RNG to an otherwise deterministic toolbox.

People who do as you describe are appealing not to quantum physics itself but rather to the mystic of quantum physics.. quantum woo. 'Quantum' is a word they throw around to give a veneer of science to their assertions, but there is nothing in the science of quantum physics that supports the notion of free will being expressed through the control of stochastic quantum phenomena like radioactive decay. People who appeal to quantum physics in this way are like people who appeal to magnetism to explain why crystals and pyramids have healing properties; there is nothing in the physics of magnetism that supports such claims, but magnets are mysterious enough to laypeople that "because magnets" is enough to impress the credulous. They're using words associated with science to imbue their ideas with some of science's credibility.