Author: Curt Doolittle

WHAT DOES PHILOSOPHY “BOIL DOWN TO”?

>>Bogdan Kolesnyk

So philosophy boils down to pragmatism?

>>Max Andronichuk

Curt Doolittle I thought this could be a topic you might get sucked into smile

>>Curt Doolittle

Thanks Max Andronichuk

Lets see if I can do this justice:

Nassim and I are working on the same problem from different directions. But out of the current generation of intellectuals we are the only two who have identified the central problem. I don’t know the proper way to frame it for everyone’s understanding, but he is trying either to determine roughly what information is necessary to justify an argument, or to state that the amount of information necessary to justify any argument is unknowable (or at least, that it is either very vast, or very expensive). I sort of see him as trying to prevent fraudulent use of innumeracy. What I would like to see (and I think what Mandelbrot was trying with his later work, is to find empirical measurements of this limit from our best empirical evidence of human decisions: economics, stock markets, and finance.

I am trying the same thing, but I have approached it differently, because I stumbled upon the failure of the Operational Revolution in a similar way to how Nassim did. I was modeling AI decisions for tanks in the 80’s as part of game design, and he was modeling decision trees for risk in the 80s. But I think what’s important about Mandelbrot’s analysis, Nassim’s analysis, and mine, is that we all were subject to Minsky’s observation: that computers teach you to think in existential operations, using a particular grammar that insulated from the errors common in philosophy that unfortunately worked their way into mathematics, and now into physics.

So our generation of thinkers understands that there is a significant problem in intellectual history that much of the 20th and now 21st century (despite Hayek’s warning) has stumbled into what Hayek called ‘mysticism’, what Poincare, Brouwer and Bridgman called pejoratively ‘philosophy’, but what most of us today would call ‘pseudoscience’ in various disciplines: philosophy, economics, social science, the physical sciences, and mathematics.

Or what I would call ‘the failure to warranty that you have sufficiently laundered error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking and deception from your theories (statements), leaving only existential information, free of projection, as truth candidates.

We can fix this problem in both philosophy and science once we grasp that practice of what we call science is nothing more than the moral discipline of laundering error, imagination, bias, wishful thinking, and deception from your statements, by various forms of testing (criticism).

If we understand then, that science, once the set of moral warranties that constitute science is complete, is identical to ethics, then philosophy and science are for all intents and purposes identical systems of thought. (I will cover why philosophy and science couldn’t merge earlier in another post at another time.)

But then we need to show how we can complete science, which consists of these criticisms:

…(a) Identity and/or ‘Naming’ (comparable, calculable)

…(b) Internal Consistency (logical)

…(c) Externally correspondent (empirical)

…(d) Parsimony (limits, or imprecisely: falsifiability)

by adding these criticisms:

…(e) Operational Descriptions (tests of existential possibility)

…(f) Full Accounting (tests against selection bias) (freedom from information loss)

…(g) Morality (tests that any statement is objectively moral);

Where:

Full Accounting refers to what economists refer to as opportunity costs: the full inter-temporal consequences – which in ethics, economics and politics is much more complex than the physical sciences.

And where:

Objective morality refers to the involuntary imposition of costs. Or stated positively, as the requirement for productive, fully informed, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same criteria.

SO THE QUESTION OF WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY REDUCIBLE TO:

It is reducible to truth-telling (science), whereby we produce truth candidates that survive criticism as a means of defeating error, imaginary content, bias, wishful thinking, justification (justificationary rationalism), and deception.

Conversely: If it isn’t reducible to truth telling, then you have a serious problem on your hands. smile emoticon

(That should melt your brains for a few months.)

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

Kiev, Ukraine.

>>>Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am working on bias-variance where we see that it is OK to miss the truth if it lowers the error rate.

>>>Curt Doolittle

I will flip this from the justificationary phrasing that Nassim is using, to “It is ok to miss truth if you warranty that you have performed due diligence against negative externalities.” This is “SKIN IN THE GAME”.

>>>Curt Doolittle

“SKIN IN THE GAME”

An individual performs a demonstrated preference for a theory prior to action, where as an observation functions as a demonstrated preference post-action.

In other words, there is no test of an individuals hypothesis, even to himself, without demonstrated preference. Statements are meaningless. The only way we know if someone has made a statement that has passed his own cognitive biases is if he demonstrates a preference by placing skin in the game.