different goals, different products. In many ways I think that makes patents more useful.

Yes and he says a dictatorship would be just fine if there were not limits to knowledge. He is squarely in the camp of Kant and Hume. He is not a true friend of freedom, science, reason, or objectivity.

10-15 years ago I might have taken your position. Then I noticed that the Austrians were wrong on patents, which I discovered was because they were wrong on Property Rights and rejected Locke. They are not honest enough to say they reject Locke, they just reject his formulation of how and why property rights exist, which Locke said was the most important right. They say they are for the Constitution, but then they ignore that the only right mentioned in the original constitution is patents and copyrights.

I noticed that many Austrians seemed to be religious and I wondered why this was, so I started investigating. Von Mises was an atheist but more in the way Marx is an atheist than Rand. I found David Kelley's paper on Rand v. Hayek and it is clear that Hayek is talking about the fundamental limits of reason. He is clear that he thinks Locke's natural rights is not based in reason and cannot be based in reason, it is based on some sort of cultural evolution, which by the way makes him a moral relativist. I then investigated Von Mises and his idea that prices were subjective.. I use to make this argument myself, but it always bothered me because even the best interpretation turns economics into a game with little or no connection to reality. But Mises was not and is not saying prices and values are determined by each individual, he is saying they are not connected to reality.

The reason Austrians attract religious people like Robbie is because the philosophical foundations are consistent with religion not with science - which makes them more like the socialists (post modernist movement) than objectivists or Locke or the enlightenment. Rand used to warn that capitalisms defenders were worse than its enemies and I put the Austrian squarely in that camp.

Many people disagree with me, but I think the whole delving into psychology was a mistake. I think Brandens were nice people and it appears they helped Rand in business and may be why we have the non-fiction books. But I do not think they were brilliant intellectually and I think they somewhat sidetracked Rand. A simple thing I wish she would have done is write her non-fiction books in a straight logical structure rather than a series of loosely connected essays.

Yes, good points. But Rand discusses that every organism has a unique feature that allows the species to survive. If any organism acts against its nature, then the organism (and if done by all) the species will die out.

I can't fully develop it here,but the study of human evolution and economics would be the same thing if humans were not rational animals. And invention are the genetic adaptations of humans or economics.

Most journal articles are so brief with regard to the experimental methods sections that they cannot be reproduced. Fortunately, that is the one part of patents that has to be spelled out in excoriating detail.

No, I haven't read his epistemology articles, but Hayek's point that we operate our economics based on limited knowledge, and that an increase in knowledge (about a particular company, for example) results in better decisionmaking is still a valid one regardless of whether his epistemology is correct or not.

Actually more like ten, but still with the limit. She could have done much more if she had gotten into any of the special sciences, law, etc. with more detailed knowledge.

How? Darwin described a particular process for evolutionary development in terms of natural causes, not what a species (us in particular) or an individual should do by choice. He was aware of our distinguishing rational consciousness, but mostly related us, regarding consciousness, to lower species in terms of capacity for unexplained emotions to different degrees to explain a continuity of evolution.

Ayn Rand showed why life must be the standard for what an individual should do in his choices as his own highest purpose, not the survival or improvement of a species by choice or otherwise, and developed what life as a standard means in terms of our rational, conceptual consciousness and how to apply it. That was based on the nature of man as he is, independently of how we happened to become this way. That could have been done without a theory of evolution at all, and apparently was done without knowing much about it at all.

You ignore what Hayek wrote. Actually do some research.

J you have not read his epistemology articles. He is clear that reason cannot explain Natural Rights among other things. He claims that "knowledge" is about cultural evolution not reason (evidence and logic) that makes him a moral subjectivist. He does not believe A is A he does not believe in logic, the process of non-contradictory reasoning, and he does not believe there is a correct or reality based ethics.

I also ask my inventors to help me cover everything they teach not just what they do. That is perfectly legitimate. But I ask them to be clear as possible.

Patents are a legal document, not a journal article. I find most journal articles to be long on data and short on how the invention (setup) was created. I do not read a lot of chemical patents however. A legal document has different criteria, but in patents the number one issue of the specification is that you can practice the invention, not exhaustive proof of the underlying science. In fact, it is irrelevant whether the inventor understands the science, what matters is whether one skilled in the art can practice the invention. That said if you cannot explain the underlying science, then the patent is likely to be much narrower.

Moreover, the reason why the biggest trading exchanges are in the USA is because market knowledge is more complete (less limited) here than in most other places. It is easier to estimate appropriate pricing/valuation in such a market.

I don't read patents as often as you do, but I do read about 100 per year. They are far more difficult to read than the average journal article in a scholarly journal like the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The examples are just about the only straightforward part of most patents. The rest of most patents is written in such a broad way that it is usually difficult to define precisely where the line of infringement is drawn. Many patent attorneys, other than yourself, ask the patent authors to be sufficiently broad to cover as much territory as possible.

Yes and so are most papers on electromagnetics, or chemistry or a variety of technical fields. That does not show Robbie's point. You cannot read patents as prose, it is more like reading a math paper. That said I will admit that in the legal profession there is a theory to be vague so you can argue a variety of positions in litigation by some. It was never my philosophy. I figured a business person would rather have a clear patent that clearly showed there was infringement or not so they could get back to business if the answer in their case was in the negative. Despite this most claims are clear within the limits of language if you take the time and understand how patent claims work.

Exactly and you can see that the Austrians have gotten way off track.

Good point. I think Rand lashed out at free market economists as she got old - see her comments on Friedman's Free to Chose TV series.

It would have been better if she would have clearly set out her disagreements. But she was only one woman.

yep

You make good points and she could not be an expert on everything, but I think an honest evaluation of her ethics shows that she leaned on the idea of Darwin to create her ethics.

Hayek does not believe that reason is limited at best. What he does believe is that knowledge is limited at best, precisely because it is localized as you say. This is precisely the reason why there are insider trading laws. What Hayek argues for, correctly in this case, is that the knowledge that is gathered through multiple sources provides a clearer, but not perfect, picture with which to make economic decisions.

Your point about second-handers is correct, db, but Robbie isn't totally wrong on this one. The majority of patents are written in a way such that people of intelligence like me even have a hard time reading them. A lot of them are written so as to obscure information; this is an unfortunate fact.

Your annoying and irrelevant religious proselytizing is not funny.

Subjectivism in any field leads to contradictory thinking.

That may be. She once said she would not try to convince a man in his 80s so set in his utilitarian philosophical ideas that she rejected. (She probably meant the rationalistic tendencies, too, which are even harder to contend with because it is more ingrained psychologically as a method of thinking.) But considering the German intellectual background Mises came from, he made great progress. There are several critical remarks about Mises' work in The Journals of Ayn Rand, but in the sense of how he undermined his own goals.

I think I had already covered "nonsense" :)