Curt Doolittle

Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

  • THE LIBERTINE ANTI-SCIENTIFIC LIE –“1. social sciences cannot control condition

    THE LIBERTINE ANTI-SCIENTIFIC LIE

    –“1. social sciences cannot control conditions such to test the variables of a hypothesis.”—

    This statement is false. It is one of the many libertine lies. As most libertine lies, and like most successful lies, it relies enough on a grain of half truth to be able to fool the audience by suggestion.

    Positivism as a movement is false, but empiricism is not. There is no requirement for constructing data, only for observing and collecting data as measurement of one kind or another, because we must be sure that by the use of measurements, we compensate for the frailty of our wishful thinking, our biases, our reason, our perception, and memory.

    For example, we can and did hypothesize red shift. We cannot create red shift, only observe it. Likewise, we can construct an theory of the economy, or of any social phenomenon, and exhaustively test the theory against all instances of the collected data.

    As long as the data that CORRESPONDS can be operationally DESCRIBED – that is, reduced to a rational series of human actions – then we have conducted both a test of external correspondence as well as a test of internal consistency.

    Just why this lie has been so successful I am not sure. I suspect that it is because people WANT to believe the lie, as they want to believe many lies. Because they try to justify what gives them advantage, rather than seek the truth whether it is advantageous to them or not.

    But the fact remains, the criticism of empiricism in the social sciences is nothing more than an elaborate lie, that literally through “advertising” by cosmopolitan libertines, has successfully overloaded an ignorant and wishful population sufficient to persist the lie – just as all cults and religions must accomplish, libertines (all cosmopolitans) have accomplished this particular lie.

    PHILOSOPHY IS IDENTICAL TO SCIENCE IF WE SPEAK THE TRUTH, AND WE MAY ONLY SPEAK THE TRUTH WHERE PHILOSOPHY IS IDENTICAL TO SCIENCE. BECAUSE THE DISCIPLINE WE CALL “SCIENCE” IS A MORAL ONE – and has nothing particular to do with scientific research, but all human inquiry.

    1 – Empiricism: observe, measure, record.

    2 – Instrumentalism: reduce the imperceptible and incomparable to the perceptible and comparable by means of formal instruments (physical instrumentation) or informal instruments (logic).

    3 – Operationalism: defend against the introduction of error, wishful thinking, bias, and imagination.

    4 – Testimonial Truth: it is not possible to testify to the truth of a proposition that you cannot state operationally, as both a means of construction (internal consistency, existential possibility), and a means of use (external correspondence, external correlation).

    As far as I know the libertine fallacy stands irreparably falsified by this argument.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-22 08:56:00 UTC

  • Ok. This isn’t my thing. I’m just trying to look into the economics and the math

    Ok. This isn’t my thing. I’m just trying to look into the economics and the math of it. But if Ebola really can have a 42 or even 21 day incubation period, that means it’s impossible to know if you have been exposed, and so every sniffle someone gets is suspect. I know people aren’t contagious until they show symptoms, but this long a period means you can’t really isolate people, and that unless you are perfectly healthy you must stay home. I guess we could temporarily criminalize public illness for a while. But it’s almost impossible to control. And with these mortality rates it’s not like 1918 even. It’s very hard to wipe out something with these characteristics. That outbreak had only a 20% mortality rate and killed about 6% of the world population. I don’t really know enough about transmission to have an opinion, but with the extreme level of care needed, that long a a gestation period, the mortality rate, it seems economically devastating just from having to fight it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-15 08:57:00 UTC

  • Can Professors At Universities Teach And Have Opinions That Are Very Much Contrary To The Scientific Community At Large?

    THE BEST ANSWER YOU WILL FIND

    All university departments hold biases, and the careers of the members of the department depend upon upholding those biases, because of the incentives to publish, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the university and departments that was inherited from the church – which invented the university.  There is very little practical difference between the practice of ideology and the practice of academic research in this regard. In practice, ideas die with their originators and sponsors, not when they are disproved. The investment is too high. The incentive to over-invest in a paradigm to retain one’s position is too high.  This is why students must choose departments based upon what the department members publish.

    Sowell’s recommended “fix” is to financially and organizationally separate research departments (that do not serve the interests of students whatsoever) from teaching departments (whose only concern is the students) but the administration (serving neither the students or the researchers) is currently consuming all the vast investment americans are making in educations (that have questionable return, and in some cases negative return.)  Realistically if undergrad students paid teaching professors, not researchers, for their education, and we regulated administration and capital acquisition to 20% of fees, education would be absurdly inexpensive, and students would leave with little debt.  We could then ask grad students and phd students and the government to bear the costs of research, rather than the undergrads. And we would shrink the administration back to it’s necessary and sufficient size.  (Financially, academia now has absorbed all the costs originally saved by eliminating the church.  For all intents and purposes, we have merely replaced academia and church with academia. In fact, I am pretty confident that academia is far more expensive than the post-enlightenment church was in every form of capital consumption.)

    But the university system is not designed for students and their careers, it is designed to provide economic rents to researchers and administrators, by selling faulty products to students,  that in any other industry would be open to class action lawsuits for fraudulent representation, and possible only because of inflationary pressure on by the government, in the same way that the government created inflationary pressure on the housing industry leading to the 2008 crash.

    See Sowell’s work and Caplan’s work.  Caplan is always someone you must be skeptical of nearly everything he says, so his his empirical work is what you can appreciate, but you must ignore all his conclusions. (Sort of like reading Marx.)

    https://www.quora.com/Can-professors-at-universities-teach-and-have-opinions-that-are-very-much-contrary-to-the-scientific-community-at-large

  • Can Professors At Universities Teach And Have Opinions That Are Very Much Contrary To The Scientific Community At Large?

    THE BEST ANSWER YOU WILL FIND

    All university departments hold biases, and the careers of the members of the department depend upon upholding those biases, because of the incentives to publish, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the university and departments that was inherited from the church – which invented the university.  There is very little practical difference between the practice of ideology and the practice of academic research in this regard. In practice, ideas die with their originators and sponsors, not when they are disproved. The investment is too high. The incentive to over-invest in a paradigm to retain one’s position is too high.  This is why students must choose departments based upon what the department members publish.

    Sowell’s recommended “fix” is to financially and organizationally separate research departments (that do not serve the interests of students whatsoever) from teaching departments (whose only concern is the students) but the administration (serving neither the students or the researchers) is currently consuming all the vast investment americans are making in educations (that have questionable return, and in some cases negative return.)  Realistically if undergrad students paid teaching professors, not researchers, for their education, and we regulated administration and capital acquisition to 20% of fees, education would be absurdly inexpensive, and students would leave with little debt.  We could then ask grad students and phd students and the government to bear the costs of research, rather than the undergrads. And we would shrink the administration back to it’s necessary and sufficient size.  (Financially, academia now has absorbed all the costs originally saved by eliminating the church.  For all intents and purposes, we have merely replaced academia and church with academia. In fact, I am pretty confident that academia is far more expensive than the post-enlightenment church was in every form of capital consumption.)

    But the university system is not designed for students and their careers, it is designed to provide economic rents to researchers and administrators, by selling faulty products to students,  that in any other industry would be open to class action lawsuits for fraudulent representation, and possible only because of inflationary pressure on by the government, in the same way that the government created inflationary pressure on the housing industry leading to the 2008 crash.

    See Sowell’s work and Caplan’s work.  Caplan is always someone you must be skeptical of nearly everything he says, so his his empirical work is what you can appreciate, but you must ignore all his conclusions. (Sort of like reading Marx.)

    https://www.quora.com/Can-professors-at-universities-teach-and-have-opinions-that-are-very-much-contrary-to-the-scientific-community-at-large

  • Untitled

    http://phys.org/news/2014-09-natural-born-killers-chimpanzee-violence.html

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-20 07:52:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304418184900344

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 14:45:00 UTC

  • David says… Duh

    http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-08-children-autism-extra-synapses-brain.htmlAs David says… Duh.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-08-22 12:03:00 UTC

  • DON’T BENEFIT, BUT DEPEND, ON INTUITION Scientific investigation is not logical

    http://www.quora.com/How-do-scientists-and-inventors-benefit-from-subjectivity-and-intuition/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=1SCIENTISTS DON’T BENEFIT, BUT DEPEND, ON INTUITION

    Scientific investigation is not logical but intuitive, because it is conducted by free association. Because formal logic has attracted unmerited attention in the 20th century, the importance of the scientist in the ‘decidability’ (which is the correct term, believe it or not) between possible avenues of exploration has been lost. There is no such possible logical means of deciding how to investigate – other than perhaps the relationship between cost and content falsified. But even this proposition is impossible to decide logically, since the domain of possible solutions is limited only by the general knowledge of the scientist and his or her capacity for free association (identification of possible patterns – which we tend to reduce to IQ.)

    In other words, it’s is not that they benefit from it, it is that they DEPEND UPON IT.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-08-06 12:21:00 UTC

  • Poincaré on Cantor's Mysticism

    [P]oincaré rejected the later foundational work of Cantor, saying that

    —“There is no actual infinity, the Cantorians have forgotten that, and they have fallen into contradiction. It is true that Cantorism rendered services, but that was when it was applied to a real problem whose terms were clearly defined, and we could walk safely. Logisticians as Cantorians have forgotten. (Poincaré 1908: 212–213; 1913b: 484)”—

  • Poincaré on Cantor’s Mysticism

    [P]oincaré rejected the later foundational work of Cantor, saying that

    —“There is no actual infinity, the Cantorians have forgotten that, and they have fallen into contradiction. It is true that Cantorism rendered services, but that was when it was applied to a real problem whose terms were clearly defined, and we could walk safely. Logisticians as Cantorians have forgotten. (Poincaré 1908: 212–213; 1913b: 484)”—