TECHNIQUE: JUSTIFICATION (MORAL) AND CRITICISM (AMORAL) You can Justify your sta

TECHNIQUE: JUSTIFICATION (MORAL) AND CRITICISM (AMORAL)

You can Justify your statements (as moral) if I trust you, and Criticize your statements (as scientific) if I don’t – or more importantly, if I cannot. Or worse, if it is not a matter of honesty but a matter of error and bias.

A jury cannot tell the truth of things, it can only determine if you acted rationally given the information at your disposal (operational test of believability of testimony given one’s of incentives), and whether your testimony corresponds with the testimony of others.

The intellectual disciplines, whether hard science or lacking hard science, all operate by the same process: testimony (publishing).

Justification (positive tests) evolved out of moral justification: adherence to norms and rules and assumptions.

Criticism (negative tests) evolved out of scientific criticism: tests of the limits of norms, rules and assumptions.

Justification is understandable for those things at human scale that we can sympathetically test by experience, and Criticism is necessary for those things we cannot sympathetically test, are not at human scale, and we cannot sympathetically test by experience.

This is because in matters of morals and norms we are chiefly looking for malfeasance: deceit.

And in matters of science we are chiefly looking for error and cognitive bias.