Joshua Claiming to have provided a warranty of due diligence against error, bias

Joshua

Claiming to have provided a warranty of due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism (pseudorationalism, pseudoscience) and deceit, without having done so.

In practice this means following the scientific method, but the completeness of that method’s practice is the question.

In social science as in psychology, we know that reported preference data is basically impossible to trust, whereas demonstrated preference data largely contradicts reported data.

We know that in psychology, they’ve spent the past 30 years trying to escape pseudoscience, because projection in psychology (observation) is as impossible as reported data.

We konw that both economics (vs social science) and cognitive science (vs psychology) caused both disciplines to reform. We know genetics and archaeology ( vs anthropology ) caused the discipline to to begin (slowly) to reform. And a present we are seeing demographic and voting patterns refute both educational ‘science’ and ‘political science’. All for the same reasons: subjective reporting is impossible wither it be self observation or other-observation.

So, when we say that the scientific method requires a warranty of due diligence, and that we require empircal due diiligence in particular, then the means by which we warranty that we are free of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit largely depends upon the construction of instrumentation, and the recording of data that is not subject to subjective interpretation.

Secondly, the most common error after subjective reporting, is temporal variability or what is often called ‘externalities’. In other words, you might measure something and think it’s a good, but you fail to measure the externalities (consequences) which might be very bad (the energy consumption of producing a photovoltaic panel has until recently been far in excess of its lifetime productivity.)

Thirdly, one must report on one’s criteria of decidability in the statement of a judgement of good, neutral, or bad. Meaning, one cannot take for granted that one’s value judgements are rational, and certainly not scientific. What are those priors? have we tested them? Or in other words, you cannot deduce from false premises, and you cannot equally deduce from false value judgements – doing so is an other form of reporting error.

But that is not the full scope we must warranty against. That full scope is:

1 – categorical consistency (identity)

2 – logical consistency (internally consistent)

3 – empirical consistency (externally correspondent)

4 – existential consistency (by use of operational language)

5 – scope consistency (full accounting, limits, and parsimony – where full accounting includes deltas in opportunity costs.)

6 – reciprocity consistency (or what we call objective morality)

Unfortunately, while most people are reluctant to comment on the physical sciences when they do not feel that they understand them, the average person at every level of society feels qualified to comment on psychological, social, political, and economic phenomenon that are in fact quite more complex than the physical.

But then this is a cognitive bias we all share. That’s because we evolved to negotiate on behalf of our reproductive interests (genes) and not to tell the truth. The average person equates truth with ‘in my, my kin’s, my alliances’, and my nation;s reproductive interests.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Curt Doolittle,

The Propertarian Institute,

Kiev, Ukraine