DEFINITION: “PSEUDOSCIENCE”
pseu·do·sci·ence ˌso͞odōˈsīəns
noun: pseudoscience; plural noun: pseudosciences; noun: pseudo-science; plural noun: pseudo-sciences
1. is a claim, belief or practice which is presented as scientific, but does not adhere to the scientific method.
Source date (UTC): 2014-03-31 17:08:00 UTC
http://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirementWHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT
(mix of modern and postmodern) (worthy of repost)
I’m glad that we see postmodernism slowly dissipating from the domain of science. But there are still a few holdouts.
Otherwise this series of opinions is some of the most thought provoking. Not in terms of the future. But in terms of the illusions that we have had in the past.
Source date (UTC): 2014-03-19 11:55:00 UTC
WHY PSEUDOSCIENCE?
–“…why equate pseudoscience with hermeneutics, given hermeneutics is about textual interpretation? I didn’t follow that link.”– Davin Eastley
Precisely because the origin of pseudo science is religion.
The origin of textual interpretation is religion.
The purpose of interpretation is ‘to find something new here’.
Jewish predisposition for, and frequent authorship of pseudoscience is the result of textual ‘interpretation’, rather than scientific experimentation.
It is not hard to overwhelm the human ability to reason with pseudoscience. It’s pretty easy really. Thats why religion works.
The purpose of:
1) Operational language
2) Internal Consistency
3) External Correspondence
4) Verification and Falsification
…is precisely to make sure that we do NOT overwhelm our very (feeble) ability to reason. The purpose of pseudoscience is specifically to overwhelm our ability to reason.
Operational language reduces any statement to that which is open to direct experience. The purpose of external correspondence reduced to empirical data is to construct something that is open to logical analysis. Logical analysis is for the purpose of reducing something to logical experience. Verification is for the purpose of confirming that all this complexity accomplishes what it claims. Falsification is for the purpose of making sure that we haven’t erred in our claims.
The reason the constitution was undermined, in no small part was the introduction of scriptural interpretation into law, which must be, in all circumstances, limited to a) original intent and b) strict constructionism, such that any modifications to the law are not made by judges but by the people’s representative body.
The common law requests judges to appeal to the legislative body when there is some unanswered question that they think needs an answer. Had this been adhered to instead of subject to interpretation, then classical liberalism (freedom) would have held until the population mandated the change, rather than the court mandating the change.
Thanks for the great question. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2014-03-07 08:45:00 UTC
SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE
(good piece)
While I’d have to agree with Hoppe that Hayek didn’t focus enough on property rights, and did focus too much on psychology (like all good classical liberals), his study of the institutions of law are decidedly NOT pseudoscientific.
Hayek’s work is hard to describe as failure, because it certainly was an improvement in intellectual history, even if he didn’t identify the causal properties of cooperation. But he did give us the arguments for necessity of the common law and the constitution.
There is a very great difference between SCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Weber, Hayek, Kronecker, Poincaré, Brouwer and PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Marx, Freud, Cantor, Russell, Keynes, Mises, Popper and Rothbard.
What does it say about us that we don’t remember those scientific failures but we are attracted to pseudoscientific arguments like moths to the sociological flame?
Is that because it is more comforting to rely upon the promise of the pseudoscientific and non falsifiable, than the promise of the scientific that is demonstrable as failure?
A study of our history knowledge doesn’t tell us that. It tells us the opposite. That when we prove something is false that is when we know something that is true – that our idea was false. When we obtain new explanatory power we love to make use of it like a child with a new toy – rarely testing it. We love our pseudosciences.
Hayek didn’t give us pseudoscience. Like Newton he was accurate but imprecise.
Curt Doolittle
Kiev.
— notes for later —
Weber was right that the advancement of civilization requires multiple special disciplines of ‘calculation’ such that
Mises was right that a fundamental problem was economic calculation.
Hayek was right that a fundamental problem is information.
Hayek was right that simple rules are necessary
Hayek was right that the common law and the constitution are required rules and rule systems.
Rothbard I think was just plain wrong outside of his history.
Hoppe was right as far as he took his arguments – which was pretty far. (Although I really wish he’d give up on argumentation.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 13:28:00 UTC
MISES WAS JUST WRONG : APRIORI VS FALSIFICATION
Mises was a victim of the Jewish enlightenment (just as Hayek suggested) and could not escape pseudoscientific text and verbalism endemic to Jewish culture. He failed to give us the logic he ‘sensed’ that describes human action by attempting to suggest that, like jewish fanaticism, it was possible to conduct deduction from first principles. It is not.
It is however possible for all humans to TEST statements reduced to some analogy to experience by way of logics or instrumentation. This “universal-ness”: the marginal indifference in human incentives – is the source of logic: reduction to perception.
So we can either reform praxeology by correcting it through inversion from a form of deduction to an empirical method of testing the rationality of incentives, or we can discard praxeology as a failed attempt at creating logic of cooperation that underlies all economic activity.
My preference is to give Mises credit by REFORMING praxeology, which would have the benefit of undermining the remaining body of pseudoscientific libertarian dogma that, because it is actually immoral in content, HINDERS the progress of liberty by providing the same false hope that ALL scriptural pseudo rational, pseudoscientific methods of inquiry do. We must remember that ratio-scientific investigation, meritocratic evolution norms, meritocratic evolution of common laws, and meritocratic circulation of elites, are slow and expensive methods of change. And that pseudoscience and pseudo-rational arguments are simply attempts to obtain some end at a discount on the expenditure of effort necessary to achieve that end empirically (by empirically, I mean “demonstrably”).
I would also prefer to discredit all of Rothbard’s pseudoscientific ghetto pseudo scientific while preserving his historical contributions to the history of fiat money and credit. His critique of the State, as that of Mises’ is a significant contribution to the criticism of political thought. However neither Mises nor Rothbard contributed what did Hoppe: a solution to the problem of formal institutions. The three men, Mises, rothbard and Hoppe, did manage to give us our first attempt at the formal logic of cooperation. Albeit, like all Continentals they failed to provide it in anglo-empirical and therefore scientific terms.
So my preference is to reform libertarianism and give credit to their contributions – contributions I have obviously made use of.
And that is my objective.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 09:44:00 UTC
RATIONALISM AND THE APRIOR AS FAILURES IN CONTRAST TO NATURAL SCIENCE – ALWAYS AND FOREVER WILL BE
–“Newton’s work stands as the great exemplar of the accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, the most salient contrast between Newton’s work and that of the great rationalist systems lies in their methods.”
“Whereas the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first principles, known a priori, Newton’s method begins with the observed phenomena of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be derived or explained.”
**”The contrast between the great success of Newton’s “bottom-up” procedure and the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.”**–
From SEP : By Mark Alznauer, Margaret Atherton, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Alan Nelson, Julius Sensat and Rachel Zuckert provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, which lead to substantial revisions.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 09:28:00 UTC
VANITY AND INTELLIGENCE IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
–“[Physical] scientists are overwhelmingly atheist,” Dutton said. “This is predicted by their high IQ, which allows you to rise above emotion and see through the fallacious, emotional arguments.” Arguments about God are all emotional arguments, he added.”–
I would argue, successfully I think; first, that intelligence forces a discount on the value and utility of the opinions of others.
And second, that learning the contrarian displacement of mythos with reason and science grants one significant status signals in life.
Unfortunately, it appears to be endemic, that very smart people rarely grasp that the dependence of the lesser intelligent, upon the opinions of others, is necessary for their ability to act by their own discretion.
Nor do they grasp that these lesser minds cannot tell the difference between one set of snake oil salesmen and another.
Nor do they grasp the pedagogical necessity of teaching the young through experiential analogy first – myth, and instrumental necessity second – science. And for many the instrumental – both logical and physical – is simply either unnecessary or irrelevant.
For the average person, reliance upon the traditional and ‘time tested’ is simply THE MOST SCIENTIFIC AND RATIONAL COURSE OF ACTION available to them.
I’m not uncomfortable stating that I discount the value of the opinions of others, and that I happily revel in the status signals that come with demonstrating one’s intelligence
But I never make the erroneous assumption that myths and traditions and even superstitions, while ARATIONAL are irrational. They are not.
And until each individual can experience an alternative that is superior to his myths and traditions, and the opinions of others, it is irrational to ask them to value, agree with, and adopt, what they cannot understand.
Because if they cannot grasp it, then we are asking them to act upon FAITH in us. Rather than faith in the accumulated wisdom of centuries.
It is a peculiar vanity of the intelligent to claim that they are the gods we should listen to.
Myself included.
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-18 05:58:00 UTC
http://phys.org/news/2014-02-evolutionary-important-success.htmlEVOLUTION FAVORS “ARRIVAL OF THE FREQUENT” NOT SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
—“Study demonstrates evolutionary ‘fitness’ is not the most important determinant of success – “By modeling populations over long timescales, the study showed that the ‘fitness’ of their traits was not the most important determinant of success. Instead, the most genetically available mutations dominated the changes in traits. The researchers found that the ‘fittest’ simply did not have time to be found, or to fix in the population over evolutionary timescales. The findings suggest that life on Earth today may not have come about by ‘survival of the fittest’, but rather by the ‘arrival of the frequent’.”–
Source date (UTC): 2014-02-17 12:06:00 UTC
(worth reading) –“Curt, loved your brief defense of praxeology earlier on (below). This is off subject but like Katherine, I too am curious in what way metaphysics failed and science is now close to triumph. An example or two please? We can go off line if you like.”– Pat Pat, This is the largest and most controversial topic in philosophy. And I find that I lose pretty much everyone when I try to address it. So I don’t think I can do it in a couple of examples. I can given an analogy between the problems of constructive/intuitional mathematics, the requirements for scientific argument (which are moral constraints actually), the problem of inconstant relations in economics, and the difference between truth and proof. And that forms a basic language for discussion. Since that conversation requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of multiple disciplines It seems that the argument is quite hard to make even if done in long form. BUT TRYING ANYWAY The best I can do is state that imagination can only be tested by action – external correspondence. And our understanding of of our actions tested by internal consistency. And the veracity of our internal consistency by our understanding of construction. As such, our logical methods allow us to construct instruments which assist us in testing correspondence, internal consistency, and construction. Albeit, while internal consistency can be expressed in complete terms, neither external correspondence nor construction can be. Without such instruments to extend our perception, memory, and calculability, we lack the ability of sufficient introspection, and the ability of sufficient external perception, to perceive the internal and external world, at the SCALE of those action that we require for cooperating in large numbers, in a vast division of knowledge and labor – the sum of which constantly reduces the cost in calories and time of the production of goods and services which serve our reproductive interests and perpetuation as a species. This is why ratio-scientific societies outperform magian and allegorical societies: because the constancy of their efforts in correspondence with physical and social reality allows them to take better advantage of physical reality and to cooperate at scale for the production of goods and services. So, since the above statements effectively reflect the scientific method, then the scientific method is not constrained to ‘science’ per say, but it is the only method by which we can improve our actions. ergo: the scientific method is ‘the method’ of philosophy. Now, this does not mean that allegorical language (mysticism, religion, mythology, the narrative) have no pedagogical value. They do because we cannot teach the young any other way. It does not mean that Obscurant language (deception) such as is used by the continentals as a means of maintaining loading and framing, and therefore simply preserving christianity and authoritarianism in new form, is impossible or will not succeed in achieving those desires. It does mean that achieving those desires through obscurantism, deception, framing other than by means of correspondence, will produce negative economic, social and political consequences, because of their failure to correspond to reality. -Curt
(worth reading) –“Curt, loved your brief defense of praxeology earlier on (below). This is off subject but like Katherine, I too am curious in what way metaphysics failed and science is now close to triumph. An example or two please? We can go off line if you like.”– Pat Pat, This is the largest and most controversial topic in philosophy. And I find that I lose pretty much everyone when I try to address it. So I don’t think I can do it in a couple of examples. I can given an analogy between the problems of constructive/intuitional mathematics, the requirements for scientific argument (which are moral constraints actually), the problem of inconstant relations in economics, and the difference between truth and proof. And that forms a basic language for discussion. Since that conversation requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of multiple disciplines It seems that the argument is quite hard to make even if done in long form. BUT TRYING ANYWAY The best I can do is state that imagination can only be tested by action – external correspondence. And our understanding of of our actions tested by internal consistency. And the veracity of our internal consistency by our understanding of construction. As such, our logical methods allow us to construct instruments which assist us in testing correspondence, internal consistency, and construction. Albeit, while internal consistency can be expressed in complete terms, neither external correspondence nor construction can be. Without such instruments to extend our perception, memory, and calculability, we lack the ability of sufficient introspection, and the ability of sufficient external perception, to perceive the internal and external world, at the SCALE of those action that we require for cooperating in large numbers, in a vast division of knowledge and labor – the sum of which constantly reduces the cost in calories and time of the production of goods and services which serve our reproductive interests and perpetuation as a species. This is why ratio-scientific societies outperform magian and allegorical societies: because the constancy of their efforts in correspondence with physical and social reality allows them to take better advantage of physical reality and to cooperate at scale for the production of goods and services. So, since the above statements effectively reflect the scientific method, then the scientific method is not constrained to ‘science’ per say, but it is the only method by which we can improve our actions. ergo: the scientific method is ‘the method’ of philosophy. Now, this does not mean that allegorical language (mysticism, religion, mythology, the narrative) have no pedagogical value. They do because we cannot teach the young any other way. It does not mean that Obscurant language (deception) such as is used by the continentals as a means of maintaining loading and framing, and therefore simply preserving christianity and authoritarianism in new form, is impossible or will not succeed in achieving those desires. It does mean that achieving those desires through obscurantism, deception, framing other than by means of correspondence, will produce negative economic, social and political consequences, because of their failure to correspond to reality. -Curt