Author: Curt Doolittle

Fillling out FB Profile. Favorite TV Shows. Why is it that the networks cancel everythig worth watching in the first season? I hate being a member of a minority of people who want to watch something with reasonably intelligent characters.

OK. I just dont get arresting Assange for getting women to sleep with him, and not using a condom. We’d need an awful lot of additional jails. Either arrest the guy for the real reason that you want him, or you’re abusing the justice system. I’m not a fan of this guy, and I think public opinion will crowsdsource his guilt or innocence correctly. But this kind of legalism is simply abusive. I don’t let the state use my violence on my behalf for injustice. I give my violence to the state to use on my behalf in order to prevent and resolve disputes between my fellow citizens over theft, fraud and violence. I do not give my violence to the state to use on my behalf to trump up bad manners into illegal actions for the purpose of political nonsense. It’s just proving his position that our governments are corrupt. Arrest him for distributing state secrets (even if they are meaningless so far). Make an example of him if you want. But we’re going to have to legalize prostitution, universally license all women, and men are going to have to ask for receipts in order to have sex and prove it was voluntary. Ridiculous. Brits should be ashamed.

I read and commented on a piece recently that lamented the rise in rhinoplasty (nose jobs) among Iranian women, seeking smaller more feminine noses. But I am not sure it’s a reason for lament. SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STATUS Self modification is partly popular because it is expensive and demonstrates that you have joined the market-participating (middle) classes. So, partly, this is about status seeking. Status seeking is important because it controls access to mates. It is not as important for men as women. Women are more status conscious of men, and men more beauty conscious of women. In reality this is a pretty successful algorithm for a population to follow. It increases everything good, and causes rotation of elites and genes. INTERNATIONAL STATUS AND POWER Aside from local trends, people also adopt status signals based upon which culture has ‘power’. As the west rose, western dress and ‘looks’ increased in status. As the west declines in power, regional preferences are becoming favored. (We see this in the returning preference for paternalism in china for example.) So STATUS properties are plastic and to some degree — they are a ‘fashion’.

[callout]Think of it as part of ‘globalization’: symmetry across all human forms.[/callout]

UNIVERSAL SYMBOLS OF BEAUTY Conversely, there are certain properties of beauty that are universal, such as health, waist-hip ratio, height weight proportionality, long legs, and hemispheric symmetry. It turns out that, “on the whole” people view large noses as asymmetric now that they have exposure to enough human variety to see them as a asymmetric. Therefore, regional “racial” symbols of attraction are subject to change because of exposure to a large number of different faces, with different status attributes. THE CONCEPT OF PHYSICAL SYMMETRY UNDER GLOBALIZATION Think of it as part of ‘globalization’: symmetry across all human forms. Although across all cultures, there appears to be a universally attractive look, and this look is associated with being ‘white’ the truth is that it’s just the greatest symmetry that can be obtained in the human form as we currently undertand it. (This is an interesting area of research.) But it is not whiteness. It’s symmetry on the one hand and ‘feminine fineness’ over masculine mass that determines beauty (in women). So this tendency is a mathematical expression. (I read recently that prettier women have more children so that it’s likely that the process will improve, but then there are gene-pool collisions that simply haven’t worked themselves out in every region.) COUNTERACTING TRENDS It might be useful to note that people will not likely adopt asymmetric modifications (enlarged noses) in order to achieve status. People will tend to increase their appreciation for local asymmetry (traits dominant in their local group) if it is associated with greater status – such as nationalistic or racial traits. Therefore the fashionability of nose modification will drop even if the permanent attraction of smaller noses as more attractive doesn’t. In other words, the priority of these different status symbols can change over time. We see racial feature preferences in Jewish, African American, Greek and Italian populations. It has gone out of fashion and become impolitic for white northern europeans to classify themselves racially beautiful examples, and instead they simply refer to more general ‘beauty’. Despite that other racial groups do maintain their preferences. ITS AFFECTING ‘WHITE’ PEOPLE AS WELL It may be interesting to note that white women currently envy african buttocks and east asian body weight distribution, rather than traditional fertility-driven ‘curviness” — so feature-envy it works both ways. It may also be interesting to note that ‘white’ skin color is a fashion, not an absolute. Skin clarity demonstrates health, and lighter appears to be more attractive than darker, no matter what race you’re in. But It appears we like ‘very light coffee colored’ as the ultimate symbol of health, because ‘very white’ that borders on translucent is also now associated with lack of skin plasticity (aging badly). So, we are ‘learning’ some things that are meaningful as well. BEAUTY IS A COMPLEX NETWORK So, beauty is determined by a number of properties: International cultural power status. Local Economic Status, symmetry, femininity, healthiness, and “globalization” – exposure to greater choice. We can all feel equally inadequate. (Spoken as a small nosed, short, northern european.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11923766Up to this point, other than as a diplomatic inconvenience, the information leaked has been a non-event, and nothing was in the cables that wasn’t discussed in the community, right out in the open. Actually, what’s been interesting is just how mundane the content has been – illustrating nothing more than the natural incompetence that arises from imperial overreach. But if this new list exposes potential targets I thi

The new facebook profile has some nice features, but the new navigation is a catastrophe. I mean, they’ve hidden or lost the application settings menu item, and it’s impossible now to find anything.

From Thinkmarkets: Scientism in the way of science by Gene Callahan. Gene takes critics of economics to task. I misunderstand it at first, (as does Ebeling), and the ensuing commentary is worth reading. (Originally posted there. Posted here for documentary purposes. -A nod to the few sites like Econlib that seem to think documenting one’s work this way is bad for some reason.)

I repeatedly find attacks on positions in the social sciences made based on extremely limited and, frankly, antiquated views of how the physical sciences proceed. I will give one example from a rightist criticism of a leftist view, and one that is a leftist criticism of a rightist view, to illustrate that my point has nothing to do with ideology — or perhaps, that it has to do with the way ideology can lead one to embrace flimsy criticisms of other’s positions. The first excerpt is from Hunter Lewis’s book, Where Keynes Went Wrong: “In chapter 15, we saw how Keynes wrote N = F(D), which means that employment, denoted N, is a function of demand. Demand however is defined as expected sales, not actual sales. We noted that expectations are not a measurable quantity and thus do not belong in an equation.” Well, one way to measure these expectations would be to walk around and ask the entrepreneurs “How much do you expect to sell this year?” then total up those amounts. Why in the world this would not be a fine measurable quantity is unclear. But perhaps even worse is Lewis’s contention that only a “measurable quantity” belongs in a mathematical equation. So, let us strike pi from all of our equations, and e, and, most certainly, i! All complex numbers must be banished, and negative numbers are fairly suspect as well. Furthermore, most of the entities dealt with by modern physics are not directly measurable. Instead, what we measure is a dial reading or a trail on a photographic plate, things which require a great deal of theory to connect them to entities like electrical fields or positrons. As the philosopher Susanne Langer wrote:

The sense-data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper. These data are empirical enough, but of course they are not themselves the phenomena in question; the actual phenomena stand behind them as their supposed causes… we see only the fluctuations of a tiny arrow, the trailing path of a stylus, or the appearance of a speck of light, and calculate to the “facts” of our science. What is directly observable is only a sign of the “physical fact”; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions… and [realizing this,] all at once, the edifice of human knowledge stands before us, not as a vast collection of sense reports, but as a structure of facts that are symbols and laws that are their meanings.

(Philosophy in a New Key) And surely this was what Keynes thought: aggregate demand may not be directly observable, but we can formulate laws by which itseffects are observable, for instance, in a recession. Now, whether he was correct or not is not my topic, but there is certainly nothing unscientific about his hypothesis. The second excerpt is from a history of marginalism at The New School for Social Research: “However, [marginalism’s] Achilles’ heel was the very notion of ‘marginal utility’. Marginal utility, let us be frank, is hardly a scientific concept: unobservable, unmeasurable and untestable, marginal utility is a notion with very dubious scientific standing.” Unobservable, unmeasurable and untestable — like, say, infinitesimals in calculus! (And people like Berkeley directed just such criticism at infinitesimals and other mathematical notions.) Once again, we have some unfounded belief that scientific entities must be directly observable, rather than observed by their hypothesized effects. (And certainly the theory of marginal utility predicts many observable phenomena, such as the lack of a price for air in normal circumstances.)

[callout] … probabilism in the social sciences as we understand it … is unscientific. Not simply beause the methods are logically false and because the predictive capacity of our methods are false, but because NOT USING THEM appears to produce better results than using them.[/callout]

Update:

I think that  Gene’s argument is a bit clearer now that I have read comments by others.   And perhaps I’m adding additional vectors of inquiry rather than debating his position. Gene’s argument is that people from the physical sciences argue that economics is not a science and counters the grounds on which their criticisms are based.  I interpreted his posting that people from the psychological school were forming the criticism against positivism in economics.  Gene’s criticisms are correct, in that mathematics relies upon incomplete approximations that are convenient contrivances, and that economic science relies upon similar assumptions, so he is attacking the physical sciences on their methods – saying their criticisms of social sciences are hypocritical. I would argue that since the velocity of the transfer and transformation of energy in time and space is knowable, and that the same velocity of knowledge is not yet knowable, that probabilism in the social sciences as we understand it – and as I have stated below,  is unscientific. Not simply beause the methods are logically false, and because the predictive capacity of our methods are false, but because NOT USING THEM appears to produce better results than using them. And that while results in the physical sciences have neutral consequences (or perhaps do not have moral consequences – those that affect others without their consent) that consequences of failure necessary for testing in the physical sciences creates negative externalities, as well as being simply counter-productive in the social sciences. (I believe I understand how to discover the formula for that velocity, and how to know it, but not what it is, and that someone more intelligent, and most likely younger than I am will be required to solve it. But at least google is accumulating the data needed to determine it.)

Original Reply:

Gene, Well, I think the argument against the use of models is different from that which you’re stating.  There are three or four major lines of argument in your posting all making assumptions about ‘science’ and the scientific method. Marginal utility is an expression of the relativity and subjectivity of value, and the plasticity of utility, and the dynamic variability of value in real time.  This creates a set of variables that lead to the effective uniqueness of each object in time for many (if not all) objects, which in turn leads to the categorical error of aggregation when applied to quantities, each of which includes necessary errors due to aggregation.  And this error of aggregation is the reason for non-prediction. And therefore non-prediction is caused by the very reasons austrians stated.  That in the aggregate much of this can be modeled, is true, at least for many commodities. Objects in physical space have a prior course.  So do human events.  We can measure the delta in the course of physical events, but CANNOT measure the delta in the course of social events. That is the simplest statement of the problem.  It is that social events CANNOT be measured because they are temporally unique. And further, Marginal utility is absolutely testable (and has been.) So I don’t understand, or rather, you could be making any number of points, and its unclear which. Marginal utility is a categorical description of a visible, measurable process, whenever that process results in an exchange (at least.)  True, we cannot know the opportunity costs paid by individuals, but we can measure whenever they do act to exchange goods or services. Instead, the criticism of models is not on grounds of material measurement of transactions, but that :

a) empirical models in the social sciences are not predictive and are even inversely predictive in relation to their utility in time.

b) that they are consistently not predictive (although they are descriptive of the past) and therefore false, and

c) that as demonstrably false, they are unscientific.  That due to subjectivity and innovation, plasticity of utility, and the resulting heterogeneity of capital, and asymmetry of information, shocks and the vicissitudes of time, they are logically destined to be false. (ie: it is not the use of measurement, it is the use of measurement to determine causality – not correlation but causality – that is scientific.)

d) that the use of false, non-predictive, arguments are used to justify implementing dangerous risk-accelerating unscientific policy.

e) that we cannot  model what might have been, had we not used false models to enact policy, and therefore calculate the real cost of policy. (ie: we cannot compare what might have been with what has come to pass, and sum our costs plus our profits.)

f) that by implementing such policies we expose ourselves to  and indeed, encourage greater risk. Ie: the austrian business cycle of booms and busts.

g) that it appears, that in history, whenever the commercial sector grows faster than the state can regulate it or redistribute the capital from it, and form a predatory bureaucracy upon it, the results for the entire society, at least narratively if not certainly empirically, seem to be better than those where state intervention has occurred. Meaning that the Austrian criticism is that the use of the calculus of measurement in heuristic social processes will result in non-prediction and exacerbation of risk — or at least, such models will be limited to prediction based on the asymmetry of information discovered by the act of building the model, but not of the asymmetry of information yet to be developed by innovation or shocks, and therefore undiscoverable by the process of building a model. I would argue that Keynes covered these problems in A.T.O.P. Although I am not a scholar of his work.  And that austrians agreed with him on many of those positions.  But the PRACTICAL matter is that the profession is heavily invested in a technology that demonstrably does not work, yet is relied upon for policy decisions every day. Models are a superior means of describing causal processes where language and human limits to conception fail. However, tehy rely upon a mathematics derived from the much more simplistic physical sciences.  And until we can measure the ‘natural forces’ of men’s mental capacity, which are largely the properties of memory in time when in the presence of vast information, we have no formulae by which we can call our efforts sufficiently scientific rather than simply a convenient means of toying with economies against the will of those struggling with knowledge and capital to avoid and circumvent all that toying. So either I don’t understand, or I do not think your criticism is founded. The people that criticize empiricism may not be using a substantive foundation either, and may justify sentiments and intuitions with false appeals to reason that they do not fully understand. But I do not see how your criticism is logical in the context. Looking forward, solving the problem of induction instead of relying on (false) equilibria relies that we understand, and develop a formulae what might best be called ‘velocity’, which is the rate of innovation given the limited ability of the human mind to make ‘jumps’.  Therein is a formula of greater importance than E=mC^2.  And because that velocity can be known, probabilism will have a rational boundary, rather than the irrational boundary we have conveniently constructed out of historicist necessity. I hope I have been sufficiently cogent on a subject of complexity that has admittedly exhausted many of our best minds.  And apologize in advance for my failures. Cheers.

http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2010/12/another-on-the-myth-that-isnt-manufacturing-jobs/Donald Trump? A person of interest in an economic debate? Yes, a few economists erroneously take Trump to task for suggesting that we need more manufacturing jobs. They’re wrong. He’s right. I state why – economists are confused.

http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2010/12/a-response-to-gene-callahan-scientism-in-the-way-of-science/An interesting conversation on the current state of criticism of mathematics in the social sciences.

http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2010/11/the-nature-of-man/It’s natural to attempt to benefit from a market economy while avoiding any participation in it.

Amanda thought it would be fun to dye my beard because of the advancing gray. I humored her. It was a rainy saturday afternoon and she was insistent. Now I look ten years younger, but I feel like I cheated on an exam. The things we do to entertain our loved ones.