Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

I always think what I say is obvious, but that’s just the aspie intuition talking. 🙂 This is a post to Peter B, one of our best, on why it does no good to make general complaints about people’s lack of education or inability to think and reason, without specifically stating WHY.

You know, we are very simple processors. Even the best of us have to draw diagrams to illustrate different relations between ideas. People like Feyneman (who I detest really) are able to imagine inordinately complex relations, as are many mathematicians. Economics is a discipline that is counter-intuitive, and one must alter instincts and cognitive biases to make use of it.

And, so, given this limitation, it is very easy to use various forms of obscurantism to influence and frame other people’s thinking.

Science is the cure. But only if we understand the difference between science and not-science.

————————–

(on Boettke’s frustration) 🙂

Peter,

Regarding:

–“Is it possible that we are witnessing the return of the ‘public intellectual’ through the internet, but that with the sad state of schooling and education that we have an entire generation of “intellectuals” who don’t know how to think, don’t know how to construct an argument, and don’t know how to examine factual claims?”–

You have expressed repeated frustration over this and related issues over the past few months (and perhaps longer). What events or conversations are driving you to this frustration?

-Krugman as Ideal Type-

Krugman uses cunning to create loaded, framed, and obscurant language with which to accuse opponents of ignorance, anti-empiricism, stupidity and fraud, as a means of distracting from the causal properties of, and externalities produced, by his arguments. And then he fails to answer criticisms that such aggregates as we use in macro, both obscure the changes in all manner of human, social, and political, capital, and obscure the causal properties of changes in our economy.

I have tried a number of times to catalogue the number of errors he makes in a week’s worth of posts, but like any argument, the counter to such density of misrepresentation or error, when each misrepresentation or error appeals to the reader’s incentives, cognitive biases and inventory of status signals, that it is literally impossible to counter argue against them except as a purely academic exercise in the empirical measurement of deception.

– Argument By Critique –

Krugman is a master of the Culture of Critique: which is the art of using complexity and moral conjecture as a means of distracting from the analysis of one’s own advocacy. It is not a matter of advancing policy ratio-scientifically. It is a matter of criticizing RATIONAL or TRADITIONAL policy so that an alternative MORAL policy can be advanced free of criticism. In effect, this technique is a very sophisticated method of constructing a pseudo-science, by critique and moral claim, FASTER than ratio-empirical analysis can counter it.

We have seen this approach taken by Marx, Freud, Cantor, in the pseudo-sciences, and we have seen the same approach taken by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger in philosophy. More recently, in our lifetimes, we have seen postmodernists use the same method of critique in both academia, politics and the popular press as a means of redefining morality. And, it has only been since perhaps, 2000, beginning with Pinker, that science has begun to dismantle the counter-factual arguments of the technique of ‘Critique’.

– Cause in Argument is the same as Cause in Science –

So, what troubles me about your objections, which I agree with, is that they’re not specific enough. You aren’t identifying WHY PSEUDOSCIENCE under the political force of Critique, and the various rhetorical means of deception, succeeds in OVERLOADING the ability of most people to rationally process arguments.

Most of the time you make arguments that appeal to the scientific method, or knowledge of a domain, without articulating how it is that we defend and test against the complex method of deception in the method of Critique. Science does not solve this problem empirically, but linguistically: with operational language, and the Canons of Science. The scientific method is a MORAL DISCIPLINE. It reduces error, a bit, but moreso, it prevents evangelism, aspiration, loading, framing, obscurantism. The method of Critique does just the opposite.

For your arguments to be effective, and other than complaints, and arguments by weak analogy, you would have to continue on your argumentative path that macro is not scientific, but pseudo scientific, and that we violently extract human, social, political, and material capital from families, from generations, from out entire civilization by the use of pseudoscience that selectively chooses easy to obtain data as a means of selective measurement, and as such, selective advancement of progressive communal morality at the expense of traditional conservative and libertarian, individualistic morality. And does so at enormous cost to our civilization, in all forms of capital. And does so by deceptive means.

– On Journals and Public Speech –

I disagree with your argument that top journals are a test of ideas. If anything such an argument when out the window with Popper and Kuhn logically defeated that position, and empirical analysis suggests that indeed, the publishing of books is the only test. Papers in journals may be necessary and analogous to intellectual copyright claims, and journals analogous to patent registries; but evidence suggests that it requires a book length treatise to make even a trivial argument, and to test it in the market of ideas.

The internet decreases publishing costs, and as such increases the volume of low content, but high demand arguments. My experience is the opposite of yours, perhaps, because I see each argumentative ecosystem as competing with itself:

Hierarchy of argument:

1) Sentimental (emotive)

2) Moral or Allegorical (shaming)

3) Historical (analogy)

4) Rational

5) Empirical (subjective surveys)

6) Economic (objective measurements)

7) Ratio-empirical (all of the above based up on incentives)

Just because you can hear the din, does not mean it was not there before. It always has been.

And as far as I can tell, from participating in this game for twenty years, the quality of argument in each sector is improving. In no small part because from the top-down, science is defeating critique.

We can win. But science is not a speedy process.

I hope I’ve put an idea thats of value to you somewhere in there. 🙂

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev

(on Boettke’s frustration) 🙂

Peter,

Regarding:

–“Is it possible that we are witnessing the return of the ‘public intellectual’ through the internet, but that with the sad state of schooling and education that we have an entire generation of “intellectuals” who don’t know how to think, don’t know how to construct an argument, and don’t know how to examine factual claims?”–

You have expressed repeated frustration over this and related issues over the past few months (and perhaps longer). What events or conversations are driving you to this frustration?

-Krugman as Ideal Type-

Krugman uses cunning to create loaded, framed, and obscurant language with which to accuse opponents of ignorance, anti-empiricism, stupidity and fraud, as a means of distracting from the causal properties of, and externalities produced, by his arguments. And then he fails to answer criticisms that such aggregates as we use in macro, both obscure the changes in all manner of human, social, and political, capital, and obscure the causal properties of changes in our economy.

I have tried a number of times to catalogue the number of errors he makes in a week’s worth of posts, but like any argument, the counter to such density of misrepresentation or error, when each misrepresentation or error appeals to the reader’s incentives, cognitive biases and inventory of status signals, that it is literally impossible to counter argue against them except as a purely academic exercise in the empirical measurement of deception.

– Argument By Critique –

Krugman is a master of the Culture of Critique: which is the art of using complexity and moral conjecture as a means of distracting from the analysis of one’s own advocacy. It is not a matter of advancing policy ratio-scientifically. It is a matter of criticizing RATIONAL or TRADITIONAL policy so that an alternative MORAL policy can be advanced free of criticism. In effect, this technique is a very sophisticated method of constructing a pseudo-science, by critique and moral claim, FASTER than ratio-empirical analysis can counter it.

We have seen this approach taken by Marx, Freud, Cantor, in the pseudo-sciences, and we have seen the same approach taken by Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger in philosophy. More recently, in our lifetimes, we have seen postmodernists use the same method of critique in both academia, politics and the popular press as a means of redefining morality. And, it has only been since perhaps, 2000, beginning with Pinker, that science has begun to dismantle the counter-factual arguments of the technique of ‘Critique’.

– Cause in Argument is the same as Cause in Science –

So, what troubles me about your objections, which I agree with, is that they’re not specific enough. You aren’t identifying WHY PSEUDOSCIENCE under the political force of Critique, and the various rhetorical means of deception, by OVERLOADING the ability of most people to rationally process arguments.

Most of the time you make arguments that appeal to the scientific method, or knowledge of a domain, without articulating how it is that we defend and test against the complex method of deception in the method of Critique. Science does not solve this problem empirically, but linguistically: with operational language, and the Canons of Science. The scientific method is a MORAL DISCIPLINE. It reduces error, a bit, but moreso, it prevents evangelism, aspiration, loading, framing, obscurantism. The method of Critique does just the opposite.

For your arguments to be effective, and other than complaints, and arguments by weak analogy, you would have to continue on your argumentative path that macro is not scientific, but pseudo scientific, and that we violently extract human, social, political, and material capital from families, from generations, from out entire civilization by the use of pseudoscience that selectively chooses easy to obtain data as a means of selective measurement, and as such, selective advancement of progressive communal morality at the expense of traditional conservative and libertarian, individualistic morality. And does so at enormous cost to our civilization, in all forms of capital. And does so by deceptive means.

– On Journals and Public Speech –

I disagree with your argument that top journals are a test of ideas. If anything such an argument when out the window with Popper and Kuhn logically defeated that position, and empirical analysis suggests that indeed, the publishing of books is the only test. Papers in journals may be necessary and analogous to intellectual copyright claims, and journals analogous to patent registries; but evidence suggests that it requires a book length treatise to make even a trivial argument, and to test it in the market of ideas.

The internet decreases publishing costs, and as such increases the volume of low content, but high demand arguments. My experience is the opposite of yours, perhaps, because I see each argumentative ecosystem as competing with itself:

Hierarchy of argument:

1) Sentimental (emotive)

2) Moral or Allegorical (shaming)

3) Historical (analogy)

4) Rational

5) Empirical (subjective surveys)

6) Economic (objective measurements)

7) Ratio-empirical (all of the above based up on incentives)

Just because you can hear the din, does not mean it was not there before. It always has been.

And as far as I can tell, from participating in this game for twenty years, the quality of argument in each sector is improving. In no small part because from the top-down, science is defeating critique.

We can win. But science is not a speedy process.

I hope I’ve put an idea thats of value to you somewhere in there. 🙂

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev