Curt Doolittle

Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

  • ON PRAXEOLOGY AS ADVOCACY OR SCIENCE Why would we suppose that a science of huma

    ON PRAXEOLOGY AS ADVOCACY OR SCIENCE

    Why would we suppose that a science of human action would advocate liberty? Or, would the science of human action, not advocate liberty, but simply EXPLAIN all possible human incentives, and the means of cooperation possible within those, whether those incentives produced liberty or not?

    (Riddle on that one a bit.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-27 14:53:00 UTC

  • ADVOCACY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE Sorry. The state has created the problem o

    ADVOCACY IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE

    Sorry. The state has created the problem of bad science like it has created almost all other ‘bads’ in our society.

    Advocacy is the job of public intellectuals.

    Facts are the job of scientists.

    Skepticism is the job of citizens.

    Judith Curry’s blog is fascinating to read – the moral hazard of scientific advocacy is inescapable, but there are a thousand regulatory prognostications a day, none of which will make any difference. People follow incentives. And advocacy makes for bad science. Books are the only advocacy that science appears to make possible. Papers are merely property claims on intellectual products. The are IP rights for ideas among scholars, scientists, and academics.

    Advocacy is advertising for grant money.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-23 08:43:00 UTC

  • What Would It Take For The United States To Convert To The Metric System? Is It Reasonable To Think That If A Movement Was Started Among The People And Many Started Showing Support, That This Could Force The Government’s Hand?

    We use both measures.
    The truth is, that for the majority of household and personal functions, “human scale’ measurements are actually superior to metric measurements. At present, human scale measures are used for human scale work, and metric measurements are used for scientific work.  And there is a good argument to make that this is the optimum.

    For example the mercury scale and pound do not require fractional representation in order to represent sensory differences.  In other words, the Celsius scale and the Kilogram are less precise than their human scale competitors, and must resort to fractional representation.   There is no material value to the C scale, that is within human perception.

    https://www.quora.com/What-would-it-take-for-the-United-States-to-convert-to-the-metric-system-Is-it-reasonable-to-think-that-if-a-movement-was-started-among-the-people-and-many-started-showing-support-that-this-could-force-the-government’s-hand

  • What Would It Take For The United States To Convert To The Metric System? Is It Reasonable To Think That If A Movement Was Started Among The People And Many Started Showing Support, That This Could Force The Government’s Hand?

    We use both measures.
    The truth is, that for the majority of household and personal functions, “human scale’ measurements are actually superior to metric measurements. At present, human scale measures are used for human scale work, and metric measurements are used for scientific work.  And there is a good argument to make that this is the optimum.

    For example the mercury scale and pound do not require fractional representation in order to represent sensory differences.  In other words, the Celsius scale and the Kilogram are less precise than their human scale competitors, and must resort to fractional representation.   There is no material value to the C scale, that is within human perception.

    https://www.quora.com/What-would-it-take-for-the-United-States-to-convert-to-the-metric-system-Is-it-reasonable-to-think-that-if-a-movement-was-started-among-the-people-and-many-started-showing-support-that-this-could-force-the-government’s-hand

  • “In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much

    “In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism; you have to be VERY learned to be THAT wrong.” — Steven Weinberg

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-06 13:58:00 UTC

  • On The Distribution Of Platonism In The Stem Fields

      I have been struggling with this idea for a while: that, for some reason, of the empirical fields, including math, physics, engineering, computer science, and economics (into which I include the social sciences), it appears that platonism seems to originate in philosophical spiritualism, gain legitimacy in mathematics and roll downhill until it is cleansed by computer scientists and engineers. What’s interesting to me, is that it just seems, in all the fields, that platonism is the definition of most philosophy, so pervasive in math, to the point of being endemic and inescapable and impervious to correction, even if it doesn’t need to be. …Human Beings As They Dream… …………..Philosophy……………………. ………………Logic………………………… ……………–Math–…………………….. ……..Physical…….Behavioral…………. ..(constant vs inconstant relations)… …….Physics………Economics…………. ………….(observation)………………….. Engineering—Computer Science….. ………….(interaction)……………………. …Human Beings As They Really Act.. It’s just strange that the only empirical people you seem to be able to trust are people who work with machines. ‘Cause they can tell the difference between an abstract name for something and the operational process for bringing it into being. Computer scientists never make this mistake. Mathematicians do all the time, and actually defend what they do not themselves understand. I have heard a lot of criticism of engineers and computer scientists over the past few decades and I’ve just found that sure, in any discipline there are idiots. There are ‘scientistic’ physicists too, and ‘financial economists’. But the difference between fields is the use of operational language, and operational language isn’t platonic. That’s what makes ‘science’ into ‘science’. – OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE = HUMAN ACTION. Human action that is open to sympathetic testing – experience. Praxeology was backwards. You can sympathetically test something. You cant deduce much from that tho.

  • On The Distribution Of Platonism In The Stem Fields

      I have been struggling with this idea for a while: that, for some reason, of the empirical fields, including math, physics, engineering, computer science, and economics (into which I include the social sciences), it appears that platonism seems to originate in philosophical spiritualism, gain legitimacy in mathematics and roll downhill until it is cleansed by computer scientists and engineers. What’s interesting to me, is that it just seems, in all the fields, that platonism is the definition of most philosophy, so pervasive in math, to the point of being endemic and inescapable and impervious to correction, even if it doesn’t need to be. …Human Beings As They Dream… …………..Philosophy……………………. ………………Logic………………………… ……………–Math–…………………….. ……..Physical…….Behavioral…………. ..(constant vs inconstant relations)… …….Physics………Economics…………. ………….(observation)………………….. Engineering—Computer Science….. ………….(interaction)……………………. …Human Beings As They Really Act.. It’s just strange that the only empirical people you seem to be able to trust are people who work with machines. ‘Cause they can tell the difference between an abstract name for something and the operational process for bringing it into being. Computer scientists never make this mistake. Mathematicians do all the time, and actually defend what they do not themselves understand. I have heard a lot of criticism of engineers and computer scientists over the past few decades and I’ve just found that sure, in any discipline there are idiots. There are ‘scientistic’ physicists too, and ‘financial economists’. But the difference between fields is the use of operational language, and operational language isn’t platonic. That’s what makes ‘science’ into ‘science’. – OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE = HUMAN ACTION. Human action that is open to sympathetic testing – experience. Praxeology was backwards. You can sympathetically test something. You cant deduce much from that tho.

  • ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF PLATONISM IN THE STEM FIELDS I have been struggling with

    ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF PLATONISM IN THE STEM FIELDS

    I have been struggling with this idea for a while: that, for some reason, of the empirical fields, including math, physics, engineering, computer science, and economics (into which I include the social sciences), it appears that platonism seems to originate in philosophical spiritualism, gain legitimacy in mathematics and roll downhill until it is cleansed by computer scientists and engineers.

    What’s interesting to me, is that it just seems, in all the fields, that platonism is the definition of most philosophy, so pervasive in math, to the point of being endemic and inescapable and impervious to correction, even if it doesn’t need to be.

    …Human Beings As They Dream…

    …………..Philosophy…………………….

    ………………Logic…………………………

    ……………–Math–……………………..

    ……..Physical…….Behavioral………….

    ..(constant vs inconstant relations)…

    …….Physics………Economics………….

    ………….(observation)…………………..

    Engineering—Computer Science…..

    ………….(interaction)…………………….

    …Human Beings As They Really Act..

    It’s just strange that the only empirical people you seem to be able to trust are people who work with machines. ‘Cause they can tell the difference between an abstract name for something and the operational process for bringing it into being. Computer scientists never make this mistake. Mathematicians do all the time, and actually defend what they do not themselves understand.

    I have heard a lot of criticism of engineers and computer scientists over the past few decades and I’ve just found that sure, in any discipline there are idiots. There are ‘scientistic’ physicists too, and ‘financial economists’. But the difference between fields is the use of operational language, and operational language isn’t platonic.

    That’s what makes ‘science’ into ‘science’.

    – OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE = HUMAN ACTION.

    Human action that is open to sympathetic testing – experience.

    Praxeology was backwards.

    You can sympathetically test something.

    You cant deduce much from that tho.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-15 13:52:00 UTC

  • Relationship Between Genes

    http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/deletion_of_any_single_gene_provokes_mutations_elsewhere_in_the_genomeCausal Relationship Between Genes

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-14 03:12:00 UTC

  • PLATONISM sigh. There’s no ‘there’, ‘there’. Don’t confuse forecasting and remem

    PLATONISM sigh. There’s no ‘there’, ‘there’. Don’t confuse forecasting and remembering with existing. Existence is action in time, and the use of memory to experience the change. The rest of it’s just entertainment.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 16:33:00 UTC