Curt Doolittle

Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

  • “The phrase “survival of the fittest“, which was coined not by Darwin but by the

    —“The phrase “survival of the fittest“, which was coined not by Darwin but by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, is widely misunderstood.

    For starters, there is a lot more to evolution by natural selection than just the survival of the fittest. There must also be a population of replicating entities and variations between them that affect fitness – variation that must be heritable. By itself, survival of the fittest is a dead end. Business people are especially guilty of confusing survival of the fittest with evolution.

    What’s more, although the phrase conjures up an image of a violent struggle for survival, in reality the word “fittest” seldom means the strongest or the most aggressive. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative. Forget Rambo, think Einstein or Gandhi.

    What we see in the wild is not every animal for itself. Cooperation is an incredibly successful survival strategy. Indeed it has been the basis of all the most dramatic steps in the history of life. Complex cells evolved from cooperating simple cells. Multicellular organisms are made up of cooperating complex cells. Superorganisms such as bee or ant colonies consist of cooperating individual”—

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-27 17:03:00 UTC

  • “In ‘survival of the fittest’, I understood that ‘fittest’ meant ‘best fit with

    —“In ‘survival of the fittest’, I understood that ‘fittest’ meant ‘best fit with the environment’. But the unfit still don’t fit by that model.”–Claire Rae Randall

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-27 12:30:00 UTC

  • Survival of the fittest is just a means of overstating the case. When, in fact,

    Survival of the fittest is just a means of overstating the case. When, in fact, we see survival of all but the unfit.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-27 11:01:00 UTC

  • DEFLATING “SCIENCE” (personal)(sketch) The Discipline of Science Consists of: 1)

    DEFLATING “SCIENCE”

    (personal)(sketch)

    The Discipline of Science Consists of:

    1) An aesthetic discipline – the search for status, power(influence), and profit through the acquisition of decidability (truth) and recipe (knowledge) and ‘stories’ (narratives), by observation, free association, and the elimination of ignorance thru deceit.

    2) A technical discipline – the application and inventions of measures both physical, logical, and social(market) that reduce our possibility of engaging in ignorance thru deceit, leaving only truthful candidates for decidability, recipe and story.

    3) A moral discipline – the means of describing and publishing our measurements, decidability, recipe, and stories by performing due diligence against: ignorance thru deceit, and publishing (speaking) the measurements, decidability, recipes, and ‘stories’ for testing by the market for measurements, decidability, recipes, and stories, consisting of others who share the aesthetic discipline of searching for status, power(influence) and profit through the acquisition of decidability(truth) reciepe(knowledge) and stories(narratives.)

    MAN IS THE MEASURE – THE UNIT OF COMMENSURABILITY

    ( … )

    THE EPISTEMIC METHOD

    There exists only one epistemological method for the discovery of recipes and theories:

    – Observation->perception,

    – Free association-> wayfinding,

    – Hypothesis->construction,

    – Theory->survival from criticism,

    – Law->survival in the market for criticism,

    – Habituation -> survival,

    – Metaphysical inclusion -> replication.

    Within this method we find special cases of the epistemological method: non-contradiction, apriorisms, simplicity – in the same way we discover special cases of prime numbers – and for the same reason: coincidence of simplicities amidst the chaos of possibilities.

    But we eventually run low on simplicities at any given level of precision, and must develop new logical and physical and moral instrumentation in order to obtain sufficient information to discover more simplicities at greater precision.

    All the while defending against our tendencies to engage in error, bias,wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, pseudorationalism, pseudo-moralism, and deceit.

    THE DIMENSIONS OF TESTING

    To warranty our speech against the dark forces of error, bias, and deceit, we can test each existentially possible dimension – in which humans can act – against error, bias, and deceit.

    – Categorical Consistency – identity

    – Logical Consistency – internal correspondence

    – Empirical Consistency – external correspondence

    – Existential Consistency – operational correspondence

    – Moral Consistency – reciprocal correspondence

    – Scope Consistency – full accounting – dimensional correspondence.

    PARTIAL TESTING : THE SPECIAL CASE: APRIORISM

    1) Apriorism is but a special case of Empiricism, just as Prime Numbers are a special case in mathematics, and just as is any set of operations that returns a natural number; and again, is a special case, just as contradiction is a special case in logic.The laws of triangles form a particularly useful set of special cases.

    2) Few (possibly no non-tautological, or at least non-reductio) aprioristic statements survive scope consistency (I can find none in economics that are actionable).

    3) We can establish free associations(hypotheses) empirically (top down) or constructively (bottom up). But the method of discovery places no truth constraint on the statement. All must survive the full test of dimensions.

    4) This does NOT mean that we cannot use a ‘partial truth’ (an hypothesis that does not survive all six dimensions) to search for further associations (partial search criteria). It is this UTILITY IN SEARCHING that we have converted first into reason, second into rationalism, third into empiricism, fourth in to operationalism, and fifth into scope consistency, and sixth into ‘natural law’ or morality or ‘voluntary cooperation’ – volition which is necessary to ensure the information quality in small groups, just as norms and laws are necessary methods of establishing limits in larger groups, just as money is necessary for producing actionable information in very large groups.

    5) there is but one epistemological method: accumulate information, identify pattern, search for hypothesis, criticize hypothesis to produce a theory, distribute the theory (speak), let others criticize the theory until it fails, or we create a conceptual norm of it (law), and finally until we habituate it entirely (metaphysical judgment).

    THE OUTPUTS OF THE DISCIPLINE OF SCIENCE

    1) Stories (Theories): Theories describe an Opportunity Field.

    2) Decidability (Instruments): Decidability describes objects, relations, values, and comparison operators.

    3) Recipes (Operations or ‘transformations’): Recipes describe actionable knowledge that we can use to transform state.

    4) Measurements (‘Facts’): Measurements describe (obviously) the operations and resulting measurements of objects, relations, and values.

    THIS COMPLETES THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

    This process constitutes the completion of the scientific method for the warranty of due diligence of one’s testimony in every domain of human inquiry without exception.

    Now, lets look at its uses…

    THE MEASURE

    1) Meaning (Awareness) ….True enough to imagine a conceptual relationship

    2) Preference ….True enough for me to feel good about.

    3) Actionability ….True enough for me to take actions that produce positive results.

    4) Morality ….True enough for me to not cause others to react negatively to me.

    5) Rationality ….True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion among my fellow people with similar values.

    6) Decidability ….True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion across different peoples with different values.

    7) Truth ….True regardless of all opinions or perspectives.

    8) Tautology ….Tautologically true: in that the two things are equal.

    THE MARKETS

    There is nothing special about physical science other than philosophy was free of COST constraints but held by moral constraints, and science was free of MORAL constraints as well as cost constraints, and judicial law was bound by both.

    Personal

    Associative

    Cooperative

    Reproductive

    Productive

    Commons

    Polities

    DISCIPLINES:

    0 – Sentience (cognitive science – limits of cognition)

    1 – Philosophy (science of truthful speech)

    2 – Law (social/cooperative science)

    3 – Economics (organizational science)

    4 – Mathematics ( science of measurement )

    5 – Physical Science (physical sciences of the universe)

    6 – Technology (physical sciences in materials)

    7 – Engineering, (physical sciences in construction)

    8 – Commerce,

    THE VALUE OF OUTPUTS OF THE DISCIPLINE OF SCIENCE

    Stories (Opportunities [search]) :

    Decidabilty (Choice / Persuade / Decide:)

    Recipies (Transformations):

    Measurements (facts):

    THE DEFLATION OF “THEORY/THEORIES”

    The Story of a theory can fail.

    The Decidability can fail.

    The Recipe can fail

    The Measurements can fail.

    Newton’s Story failed, but his Decidability, and Recipe, and Measurements survive. So while hypotheses fail, it is not necessarily true that theories fail, so much as we continuously improve the precision of those narratives, decidability, recipe and measurements.

    Why? Because the question itself frames the theory. In other words, if we are asking about gravity, newtons question, his decidability, his recipes, all survive and constitute the majority of calculations we perform to this day.

    Measurement provides a means of warranty of due diligence against ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit.

    And in fact, we can state that all logical methods constitute some means of measurement. Anything that is testable constitutes a measure. The question is only what dimensions of relations that we wish to measure, and the constancy of those relations.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-26 18:24:00 UTC

  • I would say that our senses cover a wide range of the energy spectrum, and other

    I would say that our senses cover a wide range of the energy spectrum, and other than temperature or sensitivity we are not lacking in available senses nor information processing power.

    I would say that it certainly appears that we can sense everything that we can act upon or react to. Which is all evolution can do for us. Our achievements have been in extending our ability to perceive and act at increasing scales, through the use of cooperation and instrumentation

    I would say that we evolved our reason in concert with our language, and that the limitation of serial utterance of language, and the relatively high cost of speech determines the utility of using stories (think ‘parallelization’) that make use of context (high free association ), and that precision (low context high precision) is the result of our general need to increase sense perception cognition decidability, and retention in concert with our increase in scales of cooperation and instrumentation. ergo: our minds evolved to be limited by our speech.

    As far as I know the demonstrated difference in intellectual performance over the past few centuries has been the conversion of recipe-thinking to general-rule-thinking. And that this has demonstrated that changes in the method of thought dramatically improve the structure of the brain and therefore mind, and the mind’s ability to process information by association. Ergo, seemingly burdensome training of the mind can dramatically increase processing power through the application of new general rules more correspondent with the scale of concepts we utilize. Storytelling, symbols, measures, writing and literacy, reason, rationalism, empiricism, and now testimonialism, all rewire the brain and the mind to use the tools at their disposal – admittedly at some cost of acquisition.

    We observe differences (changes). The limit is information given reaction time, and limit in causal relations. We evolved when we could make lots of use of time. We can process absurd informational density. I am not even sure if we know how to measure it. We can REASON with limited ability.

    So given that some portion of people can master higher precision and greater scale, and some lower precision and lower scale, the question is merely how to construct cooperation among people with different abilities, and we encounter one solution: voluntary exchange, and one problem: dispute resolution. While voluntary cooperation scales indefinitely, dispute resolution is limited to a maximum difference between individuals ability to judge (ergo, dunning kruger).

    Now, the universe cannot ‘lie’. Our imaginations and our brains are filled with folly we increasingly succeed in purging through the development of rules, operations, objects, relations, and values, and saturating the common folk in context and therefore eliminating their need for calculative(rational) equivalency. (environment, information, norms, institutions.

    Ergo some of us can create institutions, norms, information, and environment that the less cognitively able can depend upon as means of obviating their limited ability to calculate, and decreasing the cost of their acquisition of those patterns.

    But an individual regardless of his abilities CAN perform due diligence to the BEST of his abilities. And in fact, that is what we do. And we provide prior restraint in the form of institutions, procedures, laws, norms and traditions to both limit his ability to cause harm to others out of ignorance, and provide contextual, procedural and educational means of enabling him to act within those limits. We do this and always have done it whether it be baby, child, youth, adult, mature adult, or barbarian, slave, serf, freeman, citizen, sovereign.

    Of course, we always seek discounts, and particularly discounts that suit our biases and wishful thinking, and facilitate our use of suggestion, obscurantism and deceit within the limits we can get away with.

    To leap ahead, and seize your concern, The question might be instead, “why does one have the right to ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit if cooperation and non conflict increasingly requires we eliminate them?

    I appreciate your concern for the common man. But in each era, the defenders of the anchors of the prior order of ideas and therefore man, attempt to preserve it – always wrongly. The test is simple: are we adding to the information processing of man or we constraining or reducing it?

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-26 14:21:00 UTC

  • It’s A Function of the Right Place At The Right Time

    (to others) I would say that I was able to complete the program – the completion of the scientific enlightenment because I was lucky enough to live in an era of software programming, and lucky enough to understand how the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth century failed, because of that ‘odd’ exposure. If I had to say who was most influential it would be popper’s inability to complete his program, mises error in miscasting praxeology, hoppe’s success in using property as a unit of commensurability despite the error in his dependence upon kantian rationalism; and the observation that hayek came very close in his work on the law, but for his reliance ( like so many others) upon is perception of psychology rather than the computability and cognitive science that we have today. But that I was most able to articulate the argument clearly by combining those failures with the near successes of Hilbert,Brouwer, Bridgman in other fields. I think aside from (a) programming, (b) we have sufficient information about the failings of mathematics in modeling (Not describing) economic phenomenon, (c) we have exceptional information on cognitive science and genetics (d) we have enough evidence of voting patterns under democracy, and (e) it is finally possible because of the internet to access information rapidly enough that if one works very hard it is possible to master multiple fields in one human lifetime. So my ability to complete the program and provide the Wilsonian Synthesis ( solve the unification of science, biology, philosophy, ethics, law, economics, and politics,) was due largely to existing at the right point in time, with so many men who ca me so close just one or two or three generations before me. Unfortunately, this is going to be one of those issues just like reason (aristotle) , rationalism (Descartes) and epiricism (Bacon, locke smith hume, darwin, menger, maxwell, spencer etc ) that is going to be as unpleasant to adapt to.

  • It’s A Function of the Right Place At The Right Time

    (to others) I would say that I was able to complete the program – the completion of the scientific enlightenment because I was lucky enough to live in an era of software programming, and lucky enough to understand how the philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth century failed, because of that ‘odd’ exposure. If I had to say who was most influential it would be popper’s inability to complete his program, mises error in miscasting praxeology, hoppe’s success in using property as a unit of commensurability despite the error in his dependence upon kantian rationalism; and the observation that hayek came very close in his work on the law, but for his reliance ( like so many others) upon is perception of psychology rather than the computability and cognitive science that we have today. But that I was most able to articulate the argument clearly by combining those failures with the near successes of Hilbert,Brouwer, Bridgman in other fields. I think aside from (a) programming, (b) we have sufficient information about the failings of mathematics in modeling (Not describing) economic phenomenon, (c) we have exceptional information on cognitive science and genetics (d) we have enough evidence of voting patterns under democracy, and (e) it is finally possible because of the internet to access information rapidly enough that if one works very hard it is possible to master multiple fields in one human lifetime. So my ability to complete the program and provide the Wilsonian Synthesis ( solve the unification of science, biology, philosophy, ethics, law, economics, and politics,) was due largely to existing at the right point in time, with so many men who ca me so close just one or two or three generations before me. Unfortunately, this is going to be one of those issues just like reason (aristotle) , rationalism (Descartes) and epiricism (Bacon, locke smith hume, darwin, menger, maxwell, spencer etc ) that is going to be as unpleasant to adapt to.

  • Untitled

    http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0082

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-08 13:24:00 UTC

  • Nassim. 1) is there any need for more precise rule than exponential dist? 2) Doe

    Nassim. 1) is there any need for more precise rule than exponential dist? 2) Does the data exist to test for a more precise rule?

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-07 15:14:25 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/850366157592952832

    Reply addressees: @nntaleb

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/849692842398281729

    IN REPLY TO:

    @nntaleb

    Probability Du Jour:
    The border between thin tails & fat tails resides in exponential distribution.
    Maximum entropy under MAD constraint. https://t.co/cAXWRqVzS9

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/849692842398281729

  • SHOULD I READ POINCARE OR ABOUT POINCARE, OR ABOUT THE DEBATES POINCARE WAS ACTI

    SHOULD I READ POINCARE OR ABOUT POINCARE, OR ABOUT THE DEBATES POINCARE WAS ACTIVE IN??? 😉

    —“Hey Curt – here’s a question for you: what of Poincare’s should I read? Since I know you like him!”—Davin Eastley

    Great question. Although, Poincare was, like Hilbert, so successful, that we live in a mathematics that you probably know of so thoroughly it is really old hat to you. So reading about his biography might be interesting. Reading about his philosophy might be interesting. But reading about his math? You’ve already learned it all.

    Poincare is interesting in the debate on the foundations of mathematics and against that of Cantor. I view him along with Menger (marginalism), Mises(praxeological constructivism), Brouwer (Mathematical intuitionism and later, Constructivism), Bridgman (scientific operationalism), and Popper (Scientific falsificationism – his attempt at completing the scientific method, as part of the tribe attempting to solve the problem of pseudoscience that arose out of the excessive use of statistical analysis in the 19th century, and in particular, the use of probability by Keynes to circumvent moral (reciprocity) testing of each action in a network of transactions.

    So that said, I would suggest reading the SEP articles on Constructive Mathematics and Intuitionism first, in the context of the struggle to define the foundations of mathematics. Then to read the SEP articles on all the rest of theh players above for the same reason. Then to read Poincare’s book …. (wait… I’ll look it up, it’s escaping me)… “Science and Hypothesis”.

    There is a very great similarity between the economic calculation debate against classical economics and the intuitionist-constructivist against classical mathematics.

    Once you see the parallel you will see how this is not a problem of math or economics but of epistemology that popper suggested: it is increasinly difficult to make truth propositions that are dependent upon deductions, unless we can also construct the result we have deduced without the need for deduction.

    Stated in those terms I think its understandable. Particularly because we tend to work today in high causal density fields, with far greater categorical variation than classical mathematics operated under.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-04-07 10:54:00 UTC