SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE (good piece) While I’d have to ag

SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE

(good piece)

While I’d have to agree with Hoppe that Hayek didn’t focus enough on property rights, and did focus too much on psychology (like all good classical liberals), his study of the institutions of law are decidedly NOT pseudoscientific.

Hayek’s work is hard to describe as failure, because it certainly was an improvement in intellectual history, even if he didn’t identify the causal properties of cooperation. But he did give us the arguments for necessity of the common law and the constitution.

There is a very great difference between SCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Weber, Hayek, Kronecker, Poincaré, Brouwer and PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Marx, Freud, Cantor, Russell, Keynes, Mises, Popper and Rothbard.

What does it say about us that we don’t remember those scientific failures but we are attracted to pseudoscientific arguments like moths to the sociological flame?

Is that because it is more comforting to rely upon the promise of the pseudoscientific and non falsifiable, than the promise of the scientific that is demonstrable as failure?

A study of our history knowledge doesn’t tell us that. It tells us the opposite. That when we prove something is false that is when we know something that is true – that our idea was false. When we obtain new explanatory power we love to make use of it like a child with a new toy – rarely testing it. We love our pseudosciences.

Hayek didn’t give us pseudoscience. Like Newton he was accurate but imprecise.

Curt Doolittle

Kiev.

— notes for later —

Weber was right that the advancement of civilization requires multiple special disciplines of ‘calculation’ such that

Mises was right that a fundamental problem was economic calculation.

Hayek was right that a fundamental problem is information.

Hayek was right that simple rules are necessary

Hayek was right that the common law and the constitution are required rules and rule systems.

Rothbard I think was just plain wrong outside of his history.

Hoppe was right as far as he took his arguments – which was pretty far. (Although I really wish he’d give up on argumentation.)