Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

IT’S ONLY ARROGANCE IF YOUR WRONG: TALEB, DOOLITTLE, LISI, AND … LANGAN.

It’s only arrogance if you’re wrong. And unwillingness to invest in education of others is not arrogance. It’s just rational choice. Most accusations of arrogance are acts of fraud – attempting to use guilt rather than reason and evidence to obtain consensus. People can engage in denial, but that’s not arrogance. People can engage in fallacy. That’s not arrogance.That’s just deceit. So accuse yourself of incompetency in competing with others’ opinions, or accuse them of denial and deceit. End gossip rally and shaming and work with truth falsehood, productivity and theft.

Now, there is a problem with insufficiency of argument. For example, Nassim Taleb has tried the top down method of trying to quantify the information necessary to limit claims in the face of disruptive outliers. And he has recently (as did Hayek, and have I, and to some degree popper) come to the conclusion that only warranty of due diligence can achieve what he’d hope to achieve quantitatively. (I believe the quantitative problem will be solved by a unit of measure we will obtain from analysis of artificial intelligence software, but otherwise there is no unit of measure we can make use of.) So he has produced narratives on one hand, and math on the other, and the reality is that without some unit of measure, all we can say is that knowledge demands increase at least logarithmically.

Now, I’ve looked at pseudoscientific claims from dozens if not hundreds of people. And this includes the Electric Universe Theory, and of course, more recently Christopher Langan’s theory. And while I understand someone like taleb cannot achieve his goals because the information doesn’t exist to measure, Langan’s theory is a fictionalism (narrative) that assumes information exists that cannot. In other words, langan is constructing a justification for (proof) of god, instead of stating the obvious: any set of rules whose test of survival is seeking equilibrium will produce candidate operations, in increasing layers (layers of sets produced by possibilities of underlying operations, and that this might appear to be sentience, rather than sentience is just another layer of complexity on top of those rules.

Both Taleb and Langan (as well as myself) come off as arrogant. For the simple reason that the cost of education is so high. In the case of correct (Taleb), and incorrect (Langan) both arguments are fairly easy to decompose into operational language (transfers of information).

But while Taleb relies on analogy – and he must because the information is not available to describe mathematically – he is correct. Langan relies upon analogy to *justify a prior narrative* that god exists in some form or another, and his analogies are at best parables.

Whereas Garrett Lisi’s theory proposes a mathematica model which is terribly simple, and points us at ‘particles’ missing from our existing model, in the same way the Periodic Table pointed us at elements missing from that layer of operations we call Chemistry (molecules). Lisi is not, seemingly, terribly arrogant (I am jealous of his lifestyle and hope to copy it).

The same is true of my work on operationalism. But the difference between Taleb and I, and mathematical physicists like Lisi, is that (while taleb isn’t quite there yet) he and I are proposing law that prohibits people from using innumeracy (taleb) and rationalism (doolittle) to produce fraud using fictionalisms (pseudo-math, pseudoscience, pseudo-logic, pseudo-reason, and pseudo-narration). Because frankly, fraud by fictionalism is largely the means of profit in today’s world. In other words, there is more informational fraud today in western civilization than there is informational fraud in the world religions.

So the world is incentivized to resist reformation of law demanding due diligence and warranty (skin in the game), for information distributed in the market for information.

But the world was resistant to limiting commercial fraud, product fraud, theft, murder, violence and conquest.

The most important lesson of Via Negativa reasoning, is that we have built civilization and all its benefits, by incremental suppression of parasitism forcing everyone increasingly into voluntary market production – or extermination.

And when we passed human scale in the 1800’s, we did not move from via positiva justificationary reasoning (normative, moral and religious) to via negativa critical reasoning – except in the hard sciences.

And that is what people like taleb and I (in our arrogance) are trying to fix.