Curt Doolittle

Form: Full Essay

  • Twenty Concepts for Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Advisors, Politicians and Bureaucrats.

    Calls for the closer integration of science in political decision-making have been commonplace for decades. However, there are serious problems in the application of science to policy — from energy to health and environment to education. One suggestion to improve matters is to encourage more scientists to get involved in politics. Although laudable, it is unrealistic to expect substantially increased political involvement from scientists. Another proposal is to expand the role of chief scientific advisers, increasing their number, availability and participation in political processes. Neither approach deals with the core problem of scientific ignorance among many who vote in parliaments. Perhaps we could teach science to politicians? It is an attractive idea, but which busy politician has sufficient time? In practice, policy-makers almost never read scientific papers or books. The research relevant to the topic of the day — for example, mitochondrial replacement, bovine tuberculosis or nuclear-waste disposal — is interpreted for them by advisers or external advocates. And there is rarely, if ever, a beautifully designed double-blind, randomized, replicated, controlled experiment with a large sample size and unambiguous conclusion that tackles the exact policy issue. In this context, we suggest that the immediate priority is to improve policy-makers’ understanding of the imperfect nature of science. The essential skills are to be able to intelligently interrogate experts and advisers, and to understand the quality, limitations and biases of evidence. We term these interpretive scientific skills. These skills are more accessible than those required to understand the fundamental science itself, and can form part of the broad skill set of most politicians. To this end, we suggest 20 concepts that should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists — and anyone else who may have to interact with science or scientists. Politicians with a healthy skepticism of scientific advocates might simply prefer to arm themselves with this critical set of knowledge. We are not so naive as to believe that improved policy decisions will automatically follow. We are fully aware that scientific judgement itself is value-laden, and that bias and context are integral to how data are collected and interpreted. What we offer is a simple list of ideas that could help decision-makers to parse how evidence can contribute to a decision, and potentially to avoid undue influence by those with vested interests. The harder part — the social acceptability of different policies — remains in the hands of politicians and the broader political process. Of course, others will have slightly different lists. Our point is that a wider understanding of these 20 concepts by society would be a marked step forward.

    Twenty Concepts for Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Advisors, Politicians and Bureaucrats.

    1. Differences and chance cause variation. The real world varies unpredictably. Science is mostly about discovering what causes the patterns we see. Why is it hotter this decade than last? Why are there more birds in some areas than others? There are many explanations for such trends, so the main challenge of research is teasing apart the importance of the process of interest (for example, the effect of climate change on bird populations) from the innumerable other sources of variation (from widespread changes, such as agricultural intensification and spread of invasive species, to local-scale processes, such as the chance events that determine births and deaths).
    2. No measurement is exact. Practically all measurements have some error. If the measurement process were repeated, one might record a different result. In some cases, the measurement error might be large compared with real differences. Thus, if you are told that the economy grew by 0.13% last month, there is a moderate chance that it may actually have shrunk. Results should be presented with a precision that is appropriate for the associated error, to avoid implying an unjustified degree of accuracy.
    3. Bias is rife. Experimental design or measuring devices may produce atypical results in a given direction. For example, determining voting behaviour by asking people on the street, at home or through the Internet will sample different proportions of the population, and all may give different results. Because studies that report ‘statistically significant’ results are more likely to be written up and published, the scientific literature tends to give an exaggerated picture of the magnitude of problems or the effectiveness of solutions. An experiment might be biased by expectations: participants provided with a treatment might assume that they will experience a difference and so might behave differently or report an effect. Researchers collecting the results can be influenced by knowing who received treatment. The ideal experiment is double-blind: neither the participants nor those collecting the data know who received what. This might be straightforward in drug trials, but it is impossible for many social studies. Confirmation bias arises when scientists find evidence for a favoured theory and then become insufficiently critical of their own results, or cease searching for contrary evidence.
    4. Bigger is usually better for sample size. The average taken from a large number of observations will usually be more informative than the average taken from a smaller number of observations. That is, as we accumulate evidence, our knowledge improves. This is especially important when studies are clouded by substantial amounts of natural variation and measurement error. Thus, the effectiveness of a drug treatment will vary naturally between subjects. Its average efficacy can be more reliably and accurately estimated from a trial with tens of thousands of participants than from one with hundreds.
    5. Correlation does not imply causation. It is tempting to assume that one pattern causes another. However, the correlation might be coincidental, or it might be a result of both patterns being caused by a third factor — a ‘confounding’ or ‘lurking’ variable. For example, ecologists at one time believed that poisonous algae were killing fish in estuaries; it turned out that the algae grew where fish died. The algae did not cause the deaths.
    6. Regression to the mean can mislead. Extreme patterns in data are likely to be, at least in part, anomalies attributable to chance or error. The next count is likely to be less extreme. For example, if speed cameras are placed where there has been a spate of accidents, any reduction in the accident rate cannot be attributed to the camera; a reduction would probably have happened anyway.
    7. Extrapolating beyond the data is risky. Patterns found within a given range do not necessarily apply outside that range. Thus, it is very difficult to predict the response of ecological systems to climate change, when the rate of change is faster than has been experienced in the evolutionary history of existing species, and when the weather extremes may be entirely new.
    8. Beware the base-rate fallacy. The ability of an imperfect test to identify a condition depends upon the likelihood of that condition occurring (the base rate). For example, a person might have a blood test that is ‘99% accurate’ for a rare disease and test positive, yet they might be unlikely to have the disease. If 10,001 people have the test, of whom just one has the disease, that person will almost certainly have a positive test, but so too will a further 100 people (1%) even though they do not have the disease. This type of calculation is valuable when considering any screening procedure, say for terrorists at airports.
    9. Controls are important. A control group is dealt with in exactly the same way as the experimental group, except that the treatment is not applied. Without a control, it is difficult to determine whether a given treatment really had an effect. The control helps researchers to be reasonably sure that there are no confounding variables affecting the results. Sometimes people in trials report positive outcomes because of the context or the person providing the treatment, or even the colour of a tablet. This underlies the importance of comparing outcomes with a control, such as a tablet without the active ingredient (a placebo).
    10. Randomization avoids bias. Experiments should, wherever possible, allocate individuals or groups to interventions randomly. Comparing the educational achievement of children whose parents adopt a health programme with that of children of parents who do not is likely to suffer from bias (for example, better-educated families might be more likely to join the programme). A well-designed experiment would randomly select some parents to receive the programme while others do not.
    11. Seek replication, not pseudoreplication. Results consistent across many studies, replicated on independent populations, are more likely to be solid. The results of several such experiments may be combined in a systematic review or a meta-analysis to provide an overarching view of the topic with potentially much greater statistical power than any of the individual studies. Applying an intervention to several individuals in a group, say to a class of children, might be misleading because the children will have many features in common other than the intervention. The researchers might make the mistake of ‘pseudoreplication’ if they generalize from these children to a wider population that does not share the same commonalities. Pseudoreplication leads to unwarranted faith in the results. Pseudoreplication of studies on the abundance of cod in the Grand Banks in Newfoundland, Canada, for example, contributed to the collapse of what was once the largest cod fishery in the world.
    12. Scientists are human. Scientists have a vested interest in promoting their work, often for status and further research funding, although sometimes for direct financial gain. This can lead to selective reporting of results and occasionally, exaggeration. Peer review is not infallible: journal editors might favour positive findings and newsworthiness. Multiple, independent sources of evidence and replication are much more convincing.
    13. Significance is significant. Expressed as P, statistical significance is a measure of how likely a result is to occur by chance. Thus P = 0.01 means there is a 1-in-100 probability that what looks like an effect of the treatment could have occurred randomly, and in truth there was no effect at all. Typically, scientists report results as significant when the P-value of the test is less than 0.05 (1 in 20).
    14. Separate no effect from non-significance. The lack of a statistically significant result (say a P-value > 0.05) does not mean that there was no underlying effect: it means that no effect was detected. A small study may not have the power to detect a real difference. For example, tests of cotton and potato crops that were genetically modified to produce a toxin to protect them from damaging insects suggested that there were no adverse effects on beneficial insects such as pollinators. Yet none of the experiments had large enough sample sizes to detect impacts on beneficial species had there been any.
    15. Effect size matters. Small responses are less likely to be detected. A study with many replicates might result in a statistically significant result but have a small effect size (and so, perhaps, be unimportant). The importance of an effect size is a biological, physical or social question, and not a statistical one. In the 1990s, the editor of the US journal Epidemiology asked authors to stop using statistical significance in submitted manuscripts because authors were routinely misinterpreting the meaning of significance tests, resulting in ineffective or misguided recommendations for public-health policy.
    16. Study relevance limits generalizations. The relevance of a study depends on how much the conditions under which it is done resemble the conditions of the issue under consideration. For example, there are limits to the generalizations that one can make from animal or laboratory experiments to humans.
    17. Feelings influence risk perception. Broadly, risk can be thought of as the likelihood of an event occurring in some time frame, multiplied by the consequences should the event occur. People’s risk perception is influenced disproportionately by many things, including the rarity of the event, how much control they believe they have, the adverseness of the outcomes, and whether the risk is voluntarily or not. For example, people in the United States underestimate the risks associated with having a handgun at home by 100-fold, and overestimate the risks of living close to a nuclear reactor by 10-fold.
    18. Dependencies change the risks. It is possible to calculate the consequences of individual events, such as an extreme tide, heavy rainfall and key workers being absent. However, if the events are interrelated, (for example a storm causes a high tide, or heavy rain prevents workers from accessing the site) then the probability of their co-occurrence is much higher than might be expected8. The assurance by credit-rating agencies that groups of subprime mortgages had an exceedingly low risk of defaulting together was a major element in the 2008 collapse of the credit markets.
    19. Data can be dredged or cherry picked. Evidence can be arranged to support one point of view. To interpret an apparent association between consumption of yoghurt during pregnancy and subsequent asthma in offspring, one would need to know whether the authors set out to test this sole hypothesis, or happened across this finding in a huge data set. By contrast, the evidence for the Higgs boson specifically accounted for how hard researchers had to look for it — the ‘look-elsewhere effect’. The question to ask is: ‘What am I not being told?’
    20. Extreme measurements may mislead. Any collation of measures (the effectiveness of a given school, say) will show variability owing to differences in innate ability (teacher competence), plus sampling (children might by chance be an atypical sample with complications), plus bias (the school might be in an area where people are unusually unhealthy), plus measurement error (outcomes might be measured in different ways for different schools). However, the resulting variation is typically interpreted only as differences in innate ability, ignoring the other sources. This becomes problematic with statements describing an extreme outcome (‘the pass rate doubled’) or comparing the magnitude of the extreme with the mean (‘the pass rate in school x is three times the national average’) or the range (‘there is an x-fold difference between the highest- and lowest-performing schools’). League tables, in particular, are rarely reliable summaries of performance.

    Nature 503, 335–337 21 November 2013

  • Twenty Concepts for Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Advisors, Politicians and Bureaucrats.

    Calls for the closer integration of science in political decision-making have been commonplace for decades. However, there are serious problems in the application of science to policy — from energy to health and environment to education. One suggestion to improve matters is to encourage more scientists to get involved in politics. Although laudable, it is unrealistic to expect substantially increased political involvement from scientists. Another proposal is to expand the role of chief scientific advisers, increasing their number, availability and participation in political processes. Neither approach deals with the core problem of scientific ignorance among many who vote in parliaments. Perhaps we could teach science to politicians? It is an attractive idea, but which busy politician has sufficient time? In practice, policy-makers almost never read scientific papers or books. The research relevant to the topic of the day — for example, mitochondrial replacement, bovine tuberculosis or nuclear-waste disposal — is interpreted for them by advisers or external advocates. And there is rarely, if ever, a beautifully designed double-blind, randomized, replicated, controlled experiment with a large sample size and unambiguous conclusion that tackles the exact policy issue. In this context, we suggest that the immediate priority is to improve policy-makers’ understanding of the imperfect nature of science. The essential skills are to be able to intelligently interrogate experts and advisers, and to understand the quality, limitations and biases of evidence. We term these interpretive scientific skills. These skills are more accessible than those required to understand the fundamental science itself, and can form part of the broad skill set of most politicians. To this end, we suggest 20 concepts that should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists — and anyone else who may have to interact with science or scientists. Politicians with a healthy skepticism of scientific advocates might simply prefer to arm themselves with this critical set of knowledge. We are not so naive as to believe that improved policy decisions will automatically follow. We are fully aware that scientific judgement itself is value-laden, and that bias and context are integral to how data are collected and interpreted. What we offer is a simple list of ideas that could help decision-makers to parse how evidence can contribute to a decision, and potentially to avoid undue influence by those with vested interests. The harder part — the social acceptability of different policies — remains in the hands of politicians and the broader political process. Of course, others will have slightly different lists. Our point is that a wider understanding of these 20 concepts by society would be a marked step forward.

    Twenty Concepts for Public Intellectuals, Journalists, Advisors, Politicians and Bureaucrats.

    1. Differences and chance cause variation. The real world varies unpredictably. Science is mostly about discovering what causes the patterns we see. Why is it hotter this decade than last? Why are there more birds in some areas than others? There are many explanations for such trends, so the main challenge of research is teasing apart the importance of the process of interest (for example, the effect of climate change on bird populations) from the innumerable other sources of variation (from widespread changes, such as agricultural intensification and spread of invasive species, to local-scale processes, such as the chance events that determine births and deaths).
    2. No measurement is exact. Practically all measurements have some error. If the measurement process were repeated, one might record a different result. In some cases, the measurement error might be large compared with real differences. Thus, if you are told that the economy grew by 0.13% last month, there is a moderate chance that it may actually have shrunk. Results should be presented with a precision that is appropriate for the associated error, to avoid implying an unjustified degree of accuracy.
    3. Bias is rife. Experimental design or measuring devices may produce atypical results in a given direction. For example, determining voting behaviour by asking people on the street, at home or through the Internet will sample different proportions of the population, and all may give different results. Because studies that report ‘statistically significant’ results are more likely to be written up and published, the scientific literature tends to give an exaggerated picture of the magnitude of problems or the effectiveness of solutions. An experiment might be biased by expectations: participants provided with a treatment might assume that they will experience a difference and so might behave differently or report an effect. Researchers collecting the results can be influenced by knowing who received treatment. The ideal experiment is double-blind: neither the participants nor those collecting the data know who received what. This might be straightforward in drug trials, but it is impossible for many social studies. Confirmation bias arises when scientists find evidence for a favoured theory and then become insufficiently critical of their own results, or cease searching for contrary evidence.
    4. Bigger is usually better for sample size. The average taken from a large number of observations will usually be more informative than the average taken from a smaller number of observations. That is, as we accumulate evidence, our knowledge improves. This is especially important when studies are clouded by substantial amounts of natural variation and measurement error. Thus, the effectiveness of a drug treatment will vary naturally between subjects. Its average efficacy can be more reliably and accurately estimated from a trial with tens of thousands of participants than from one with hundreds.
    5. Correlation does not imply causation. It is tempting to assume that one pattern causes another. However, the correlation might be coincidental, or it might be a result of both patterns being caused by a third factor — a ‘confounding’ or ‘lurking’ variable. For example, ecologists at one time believed that poisonous algae were killing fish in estuaries; it turned out that the algae grew where fish died. The algae did not cause the deaths.
    6. Regression to the mean can mislead. Extreme patterns in data are likely to be, at least in part, anomalies attributable to chance or error. The next count is likely to be less extreme. For example, if speed cameras are placed where there has been a spate of accidents, any reduction in the accident rate cannot be attributed to the camera; a reduction would probably have happened anyway.
    7. Extrapolating beyond the data is risky. Patterns found within a given range do not necessarily apply outside that range. Thus, it is very difficult to predict the response of ecological systems to climate change, when the rate of change is faster than has been experienced in the evolutionary history of existing species, and when the weather extremes may be entirely new.
    8. Beware the base-rate fallacy. The ability of an imperfect test to identify a condition depends upon the likelihood of that condition occurring (the base rate). For example, a person might have a blood test that is ‘99% accurate’ for a rare disease and test positive, yet they might be unlikely to have the disease. If 10,001 people have the test, of whom just one has the disease, that person will almost certainly have a positive test, but so too will a further 100 people (1%) even though they do not have the disease. This type of calculation is valuable when considering any screening procedure, say for terrorists at airports.
    9. Controls are important. A control group is dealt with in exactly the same way as the experimental group, except that the treatment is not applied. Without a control, it is difficult to determine whether a given treatment really had an effect. The control helps researchers to be reasonably sure that there are no confounding variables affecting the results. Sometimes people in trials report positive outcomes because of the context or the person providing the treatment, or even the colour of a tablet. This underlies the importance of comparing outcomes with a control, such as a tablet without the active ingredient (a placebo).
    10. Randomization avoids bias. Experiments should, wherever possible, allocate individuals or groups to interventions randomly. Comparing the educational achievement of children whose parents adopt a health programme with that of children of parents who do not is likely to suffer from bias (for example, better-educated families might be more likely to join the programme). A well-designed experiment would randomly select some parents to receive the programme while others do not.
    11. Seek replication, not pseudoreplication. Results consistent across many studies, replicated on independent populations, are more likely to be solid. The results of several such experiments may be combined in a systematic review or a meta-analysis to provide an overarching view of the topic with potentially much greater statistical power than any of the individual studies. Applying an intervention to several individuals in a group, say to a class of children, might be misleading because the children will have many features in common other than the intervention. The researchers might make the mistake of ‘pseudoreplication’ if they generalize from these children to a wider population that does not share the same commonalities. Pseudoreplication leads to unwarranted faith in the results. Pseudoreplication of studies on the abundance of cod in the Grand Banks in Newfoundland, Canada, for example, contributed to the collapse of what was once the largest cod fishery in the world.
    12. Scientists are human. Scientists have a vested interest in promoting their work, often for status and further research funding, although sometimes for direct financial gain. This can lead to selective reporting of results and occasionally, exaggeration. Peer review is not infallible: journal editors might favour positive findings and newsworthiness. Multiple, independent sources of evidence and replication are much more convincing.
    13. Significance is significant. Expressed as P, statistical significance is a measure of how likely a result is to occur by chance. Thus P = 0.01 means there is a 1-in-100 probability that what looks like an effect of the treatment could have occurred randomly, and in truth there was no effect at all. Typically, scientists report results as significant when the P-value of the test is less than 0.05 (1 in 20).
    14. Separate no effect from non-significance. The lack of a statistically significant result (say a P-value > 0.05) does not mean that there was no underlying effect: it means that no effect was detected. A small study may not have the power to detect a real difference. For example, tests of cotton and potato crops that were genetically modified to produce a toxin to protect them from damaging insects suggested that there were no adverse effects on beneficial insects such as pollinators. Yet none of the experiments had large enough sample sizes to detect impacts on beneficial species had there been any.
    15. Effect size matters. Small responses are less likely to be detected. A study with many replicates might result in a statistically significant result but have a small effect size (and so, perhaps, be unimportant). The importance of an effect size is a biological, physical or social question, and not a statistical one. In the 1990s, the editor of the US journal Epidemiology asked authors to stop using statistical significance in submitted manuscripts because authors were routinely misinterpreting the meaning of significance tests, resulting in ineffective or misguided recommendations for public-health policy.
    16. Study relevance limits generalizations. The relevance of a study depends on how much the conditions under which it is done resemble the conditions of the issue under consideration. For example, there are limits to the generalizations that one can make from animal or laboratory experiments to humans.
    17. Feelings influence risk perception. Broadly, risk can be thought of as the likelihood of an event occurring in some time frame, multiplied by the consequences should the event occur. People’s risk perception is influenced disproportionately by many things, including the rarity of the event, how much control they believe they have, the adverseness of the outcomes, and whether the risk is voluntarily or not. For example, people in the United States underestimate the risks associated with having a handgun at home by 100-fold, and overestimate the risks of living close to a nuclear reactor by 10-fold.
    18. Dependencies change the risks. It is possible to calculate the consequences of individual events, such as an extreme tide, heavy rainfall and key workers being absent. However, if the events are interrelated, (for example a storm causes a high tide, or heavy rain prevents workers from accessing the site) then the probability of their co-occurrence is much higher than might be expected8. The assurance by credit-rating agencies that groups of subprime mortgages had an exceedingly low risk of defaulting together was a major element in the 2008 collapse of the credit markets.
    19. Data can be dredged or cherry picked. Evidence can be arranged to support one point of view. To interpret an apparent association between consumption of yoghurt during pregnancy and subsequent asthma in offspring, one would need to know whether the authors set out to test this sole hypothesis, or happened across this finding in a huge data set. By contrast, the evidence for the Higgs boson specifically accounted for how hard researchers had to look for it — the ‘look-elsewhere effect’. The question to ask is: ‘What am I not being told?’
    20. Extreme measurements may mislead. Any collation of measures (the effectiveness of a given school, say) will show variability owing to differences in innate ability (teacher competence), plus sampling (children might by chance be an atypical sample with complications), plus bias (the school might be in an area where people are unusually unhealthy), plus measurement error (outcomes might be measured in different ways for different schools). However, the resulting variation is typically interpreted only as differences in innate ability, ignoring the other sources. This becomes problematic with statements describing an extreme outcome (‘the pass rate doubled’) or comparing the magnitude of the extreme with the mean (‘the pass rate in school x is three times the national average’) or the range (‘there is an x-fold difference between the highest- and lowest-performing schools’). League tables, in particular, are rarely reliable summaries of performance.

    Nature 503, 335–337 21 November 2013

  • On Negative Sums


    – Guest Post by Eli Harman – November 22nd, at 7:04am


    [T]he allegation is often made (by libertarian anarchists) that what states do is fundamentally incalculable, but that it is always negative sum. In other words, we cannot know the absolute value of any state or state policy, but we can be certain about its sign.


    Voluntary trades in the marketplace – as the argument goes – are always mutually beneficial (else they wouldn’t occur) and positive sum.


    State policies differ in requiring coercion. If they did not require coercion, they could occur in the marketplace. But if they do, then someone is losing out, so there is no way to be sure they represent a net gain. Without the mechanism of voluntary exchange, the information transmitted by prices in a marketplace are absent and no calculation is possible. In all likelihood they represent a net loss, certainly a loss relative to the opportunity cost of the purely voluntary marketplace foregone.


    But is doesn’t seem that states ever would have become ubiquitous or persistent if this were true. Empirically, state-ridden peoples have proven competitive against stateless ones. If error and parasitism were the whole story, they would not be. States, after all, are in constant conflict and competition with one another and with alternatives (or at least they were at one time.)
    However, the argument is incomplete and therefore incorrect.

    We can reasonably expect voluntary, fully-informed, exchanges – free of externality – to be Pareto improvements. (They make someone better off and no one worse off.)


    But in the first place, market transactions don’t always live up to this standard, because they are not necessarily fully informed nor free of externality.


    And in the second place, some of the things states do might; because they are of the nature of voluntary exchanges.
    An individual exchanges the sum total of costs a state imposes (on them) for the sum total of benefits it offers (to them) every time they voluntarily choose not to move to the jurisdiction of another state. (And these exchanges can be made more precisely calculable by reducing the exit costs and increasing the number and variety of states on offer.)


    Furthermore, all states require the voluntary consent of at least enough individuals and groups to successfully compel the submission of the remainder. And the coalition that arises to perform this function arises by a process of reciprocal exchange (You want such and such a boon to participate in our coalition? Well we want this concession and that from you in exchange.)
    In brokering these exchanges, a Monarchy offers several advantages over a democratically elected government.


    A democracy will be inherently and irreparably susceptible to negative-sum corruption because of the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. A policy which benefits 1,000 people $10,000 each may be politically profitable even if it costs a million people $100 each. The concentrated interest will be relatively less hampered by information costs and coordination problems. So it will be able to muster more votes and resources in defense of the policy than those harmed will be able to muster against it, though the harm be much greater.


    Nothing would stop anyone from proposing such a policy to a king. And a king could get away with implementing it. But a king, who owns his realm and title, as well as its capital value, would not benefit from doing so. The future revenue he could expect to derive from his realm and subjects would decline as a result. And so his incentive would be to veto such proposals.


    Furthermore, in a majority democracy, if your ruling coalition encompasses more than 51 percent of voters, it’s leaving rents on the table. If you’re getting, say, 70 percent of the vote, that simply means you’re delivering more value than you need to and failing to extract as much as you could. You could take a little more and give a little less without losing the election. So in a democracy, we can expect the ruling coalition at any given time to consist of about 51% of voters (and those the worst 51%) and that does indeed seem to be what we see.


    But conflict and compulsion, though inevitable and irresolvable under democracy, are costly and actually largely unnecessary. So we can expect a wise monarch to start building his coalition of supporters with the best and keep working his way down the list until the only people that remain in need of compulsion are those who have nothing to offer which is worth what they demand in exchange for voluntary cooperation: in short, people who probably should be coerced.

  • On Negative Sums


    – Guest Post by Eli Harman – November 22nd, at 7:04am


    [T]he allegation is often made (by libertarian anarchists) that what states do is fundamentally incalculable, but that it is always negative sum. In other words, we cannot know the absolute value of any state or state policy, but we can be certain about its sign.


    Voluntary trades in the marketplace – as the argument goes – are always mutually beneficial (else they wouldn’t occur) and positive sum.


    State policies differ in requiring coercion. If they did not require coercion, they could occur in the marketplace. But if they do, then someone is losing out, so there is no way to be sure they represent a net gain. Without the mechanism of voluntary exchange, the information transmitted by prices in a marketplace are absent and no calculation is possible. In all likelihood they represent a net loss, certainly a loss relative to the opportunity cost of the purely voluntary marketplace foregone.


    But is doesn’t seem that states ever would have become ubiquitous or persistent if this were true. Empirically, state-ridden peoples have proven competitive against stateless ones. If error and parasitism were the whole story, they would not be. States, after all, are in constant conflict and competition with one another and with alternatives (or at least they were at one time.)
    However, the argument is incomplete and therefore incorrect.

    We can reasonably expect voluntary, fully-informed, exchanges – free of externality – to be Pareto improvements. (They make someone better off and no one worse off.)


    But in the first place, market transactions don’t always live up to this standard, because they are not necessarily fully informed nor free of externality.


    And in the second place, some of the things states do might; because they are of the nature of voluntary exchanges.
    An individual exchanges the sum total of costs a state imposes (on them) for the sum total of benefits it offers (to them) every time they voluntarily choose not to move to the jurisdiction of another state. (And these exchanges can be made more precisely calculable by reducing the exit costs and increasing the number and variety of states on offer.)


    Furthermore, all states require the voluntary consent of at least enough individuals and groups to successfully compel the submission of the remainder. And the coalition that arises to perform this function arises by a process of reciprocal exchange (You want such and such a boon to participate in our coalition? Well we want this concession and that from you in exchange.)
    In brokering these exchanges, a Monarchy offers several advantages over a democratically elected government.


    A democracy will be inherently and irreparably susceptible to negative-sum corruption because of the problem of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. A policy which benefits 1,000 people $10,000 each may be politically profitable even if it costs a million people $100 each. The concentrated interest will be relatively less hampered by information costs and coordination problems. So it will be able to muster more votes and resources in defense of the policy than those harmed will be able to muster against it, though the harm be much greater.


    Nothing would stop anyone from proposing such a policy to a king. And a king could get away with implementing it. But a king, who owns his realm and title, as well as its capital value, would not benefit from doing so. The future revenue he could expect to derive from his realm and subjects would decline as a result. And so his incentive would be to veto such proposals.


    Furthermore, in a majority democracy, if your ruling coalition encompasses more than 51 percent of voters, it’s leaving rents on the table. If you’re getting, say, 70 percent of the vote, that simply means you’re delivering more value than you need to and failing to extract as much as you could. You could take a little more and give a little less without losing the election. So in a democracy, we can expect the ruling coalition at any given time to consist of about 51% of voters (and those the worst 51%) and that does indeed seem to be what we see.


    But conflict and compulsion, though inevitable and irresolvable under democracy, are costly and actually largely unnecessary. So we can expect a wise monarch to start building his coalition of supporters with the best and keep working his way down the list until the only people that remain in need of compulsion are those who have nothing to offer which is worth what they demand in exchange for voluntary cooperation: in short, people who probably should be coerced.

  • WHY ARE RATIONALISTS SO AFRAID OF SCIENCE? Praxeologists argue that deduction is

    WHY ARE RATIONALISTS SO AFRAID OF SCIENCE?

    Praxeologists argue that deduction is apodictically certain, but in no case other than the axiomatic and therefore tautological CAN it be apodictically certain. (Which we’ll see below)

    All concepts that we use in premises must always remain theoretical if they are other than names of entities at an instant in time within a specific context.

    If, as Einstein demonstrated, we cannot count on the concepts of length, or time, both of which were conceived as immutable, then how can we count on any concept? Well we can’t. Other than that which is trivial.

    In order to create examples for use as models, most logicians and philosophers and amateurs as well, rely on trivial examples – but likewise, only to trivial examples do such things apply. Why? Well because trivial (reductio) examples that we can test with our mere reason, are limited to those that we **CAN** test with our mere reason. Whereas any question complex enough that we must apply deduction in any meaningful sense – meaning that we need tools of logic or mechanical devices to draw conclusions – is by definition beyond our senses.

    The concept of length is not consistent beyond human scale – and quickly becomes meaningless. If we cannot count on so simple a concept as ‘length’ to be constant, then how can we count on any other statement to be constant? All knowledge is contextually useful but if reduced to a general rule, the general rule remains theoretical, because we cannot anticipate the conditions under which that measurement (and that is the operation – transformation – that a concept performs for us).

    We can construct recipes, but general rules are always and forever theoretically not axiomatically bound, unless they are tautological. There is no escaping from this argument under any conditions other than the reductio fallacies. Recipes either work or they don’t Theories work as long as concepts (Premises) upon which the recipes function. (Elsewhere I’ve shown how Hoppe’s examples all fail, but that is to distracting to revisit here.)

    Praxeology is merely an erroneous application of the principle that an empirical observation requires proof of construction, in order for (a) an hypothesis to be both possible and (b) free of the addition of imaginary content and (c) free of deceptions whether original or inherited and (d) free of errors of mere concepts no longer applicable in the context.

    This requirement for construction says nothing about the means under which a theory was constructed. No means upon which a theory is constructed has any persuasive value unless the means of theory construction is identical to the means of operational construction – as it nearly is (although is not quite) in mathematics.

    In mathematics this is an example of the problem created by a general rule of arbitrary precision – at some point, the theoretical no longer applies to the physical – so the general rule fails. Length is not infinitely extensible, and infinity cannot be brought into existence any more so than unicorns can be found in primeval forests, or the square root of two can be determined. None can be. A

    Operational definitions constitute an existence proof. Operations must exist, and when we find an operation that does not exist, we also have found a concept (a premise) that no longer is true – whether the operation conducted in the mind is logical or conducted in physical reality is possible. Operational definitions allow us to observe changes in state of the concepts (premises) upon which our general rules (theories) depend.

    But there is nothing unique to economics in the demand for operational definitions. Science requires them to every extent possible – excepting the problem of different resources available for different tests; If math did it we would eliminate mathematical platonism, and probably reform mathematics within a generation. Psychology DID it and did reform itself within a generation. And the principle that law should be operationally written, or at least that changes to the extant law should be conducted operationally (what we call original intent and strict construction).

    Unlike the study of the physical world beyond that exists beyond human scale (whether that mean above human scale, or below human scale), we can sympathetically test, with our sense, perception, experience and reason, whether any operation that a human would have to perform, is possible and rational.

    Whereas we cannot sympathize with the first principles of the physical world – we lack senses for that – so we create a model to compensate for the weakness of our sense perception, by modeling the real world as some sort of analogy to experience – and therefore reducing what we cannot experience to that which we can. We reduce the imperceptible to the perceptible by means of instruments – physical and logical instruments – by searching for regularities and changes in those regularities, and then using those regularities to govern what operations (transformations) are possible in the real world. This instrumentation functions as a means of extending our sense, perception, experience and reason.

    But while we can know whether a phenomenon in human affairs – a human action – is both operationally possible (in mind and action), and desirable (an incentive or a counter-incentive), we cannot know the same about the physical universe – or we cannot know until we reduce the universe to some set of first principles from which all are deterministic. So while we can attest to within some reasonable margin of error what humans can do, we cannot (yet) attest to within some reasonable margin of error what will unfold in the universe. There is no equivalent (yet) in physical science to the sensation (“yes I would do that”) – at least not yet at the subatomic level.

    We have proven beyond a doubt that many (most) economic phenomenon (observed regularities) are not deducible from the operations that man is naturally capable of, without the instruments necessary to measure, convert to sensations, perceptions, and experiences, that we can even observe without the aid of instruments.

    The examples are the phenomenon of sticky prices, the myth of the rational voter, and the fact that people act morally not economically when the must choose between indifferent actions, and act morally at great personal cost if they wish to mete out either immoral and unethical punishment or altruistic punishment.

    So it is not a matter of open opinion whether economic phenomenon are DEDUCIBLE from first principles. They aren’t. They aren’t imaginable. At present, (it’s my hypothesis) that economists have not compensated for moral bias, just as economists had not compensated for cognitive bias.

    We have proven beyond a doubt that all non-axiomatic (prescriptive not descriptive), non-trivial deductions cannot be apodictically certain, in any field of endeavor.

    So while we cannot deduce all economic phenomenon, we can however, if we work at it, in economics, attempt to explain these phenomenon by deducing how they exist, by explaining how these phenomenon can be brought into existence operationally.

    We tend to call this an analysis of incentives, but while we may experience the influence of incentives, we must also perform many operations (actions whether mental or physical) to bring them about, so the operations must be possible AND the incentives must be ‘rational’ for the individual to follow.

    So the statement: no economic proposition can be true unless we can explain it operationally- is not the same as saying that economics is not an empirical discipline which we use our extant knowledge of human capacities and instruments to explain that phenomena may existentially be possible. But given the our concepts instruments and at least our mental abilities evolve via these rules, it is

    Economics is no different from any other discipline – it is the attempt to speak truthfully about what we observe. That has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with speaking truthfully.

    So to answer my question above, I do know the reason rationalists are afraid of science: because it invalidates the cult of nonsense language that they have developed to signal their wit at outwitting some opponent equally armed only with wit – and places them in the difficult position of having to do difficult work of speaking truthfully rather than constructing artful obscurantism.

    Status signals earned by obscurantist deception are still thefts.

    As far as I can tell, engineers are the only saints, soldiers tell the truth out of need, scientists tell truth by accident. Social scientists lie by accident, vector or intent. Whereas verbalism is to be suspect at all times. Because for the past century and a half it has been used primarily for the purpose of deception, parasitism, amusement, and to obtain unearned status signals in the academy.

    There is no difference at all between selling indulgences and selling diplomas.

    Truth telling matters.

    Punish the wicked.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-12 16:18:00 UTC

  • On Ukraine and Prosperity – Liberty, Violence and Rule of Law

    [I]n the past two years the hryvnia has lost HALF of its value. Prices on everything are rising, while increases in employee compensation are not. All economies face this problem. Salaries are stickier than contracts, and contracts are stickier than prices, and prices are stickier than currency. So all changes in demand for currency around the world SLOWLY work through the economy ‘unsticking’ one thing after another. And salaries are at two edged sword: employees expect them to go up when currency loses value, but employees do not expect them to go down when currency gains value. ON UKRAINE In our case we have two problems. One, that the dollar is getting more valuable in the world, and two, that the Hryvna is getting less valuable in the world. And our people pay the consequences.

    • We can only fix Ukraine’s problem with credit.
    • We can only obtain credit with legal certainty.
    • We can only obtain legal certainty with rule of law.
    • We can only possess rule of law with judges who obey rule of law.
    • We can only possess judges with the rule of law if we can replace our judges – and for that matter, the entire court staff.
    • We can only replace the judges and the court staff with someone to force them out.
    • We can only force them out if the police to act upon it.
    • We can only expect the police to act upon it if they are also uncorrupt and respect rule of law.
    • We can only have police who are uncorrupt and respect rule of law if we fire them all and re-hire them again with higher standards, higher pay, and higher punishment for corruption – it must be wiser to collect a pension than to accept a bribe of any size.
    • We can only trust that they will be punished and stay honest if we have courts that enforce it.
    • And we can only have courts that will enforce it if we have juries to override the judges.
    • And we can only juries to override the judges if we have people who will act honestly on juries.
    • We will only have people who act honestly on juries once enough Ukrainians understand that all of Ukraine depends upon them and only them:
    • (a) sit a jury and enforce the law, even against friends and family.
    • (b) speak the truth even if it leads to your loss, and require it of others, and punish them if they do not.
    • (c) replace the government by armed violence until all of the above are enacted.

    [T]he only freedom logically possible is that which is obtained by a militia at the point of a gun. Everything else is just benevolent permission – not liberty. Ether a people is able to act as a militia (a militia means every living able bodied male) to demand these things of their government, or they aren’t able to act as a militia to demand these things of their government – or replace their government if needed. You get the government you deserve. All people possess the government that they deserve. Because no government can sustain universal insurrection, because no economy can survive universal insurrection. Some of us are willing to earn the form government we HOPE to deserve by our actions. The rest simply GET the government that they do deserve by their inaction. We are not yet willing to have the government we work to deserve. Because we are not wiling to evict the entire judiciary and police force – and that is what is required. A government is by its nature corrupt. There is no exception in the world – because a government is a monopoly, and the incentives for individuals in a monopoly all favor corruption. This is why governments must remain small – it is harder to steal when it is harder to be anonymous. So keep the number of people who of necessity must be corrupt and will be corrupt – to a minimum. The people must control the government. But if the people are immoral, they will have an immoral and corrupt government. If the people are moral, then they will have a moral government even if the government’s members are of necessity corrupt in one way or another. But the hard economic facts make political corruption irrelevant – it is judicial and police corruption that prevent the expansion of consumer credit.  The corrupt economy may be large, but that does not affect the individual citizens who merely need CONSUMER CREDIT. The assumption that citizens make is that they could obtain the monies that are siphoned off personally by corrupt government employees wither in the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and asiatic models, or whether they are siphoned off systematically as in the american and european systems, as inflated salaries special benefits, special pensions, absurdly expensive offices, and expensive equipment, or privileges granted to loyal constituents, businesses, organizations and lobbyists. Government people will ALWAYS siphon unearned wealth (corruption). That is what they do. They have no competition other than the militia (armed citizenry) to stop them. [T]he WEST is just as corrupt as the east – it is just systematized into sophisticated corporeal corruption not private corruption. What differs is that in the west, the citizenry has rule of law and therefore credit. So they live well because of their own private sector economy – even though the public sector is just as corrupt everywhere else. Ukraine must evict and ban all sitting judges, clerks and administration from the courts, and all do the same for all police officers. The best choice would be to import a few hundred young German, Scandinavia, and English speaking judges to interview, hire, and manage replacement judges. This would immediately, within one year, change the european perspective on Ukraine and credit. Georgia has already shown us how to fix the police. The problem then is not politicians that prevent us from prosperity WE MUST SOLVE THE RIGHT PROBLEM. The problem that prevents us from prosperity is that we are solving the wrong problem. Politicians are all corrupt. Judges and police who are paid a decent salary are all we need in order to build a prosperous Ukraine. As always the politicians will seek to siphon it off for their own corrupt use just as they do in the west. Just as they do everywhere. Because politicians are by necessity agents of corruption – even when they dont’ intend to be. They have no means of measuring what is ‘right’ other than ‘what they can get away with’. A child has no means of measuring what is right and wrong without a parent. A business has no measure of whether they efficiently serve the world except if they do not do so at a loss. And a politician’s only measure is what corruption can he get away with without voters, judges, police, and competing politicians to stop him. Freedom is created by courts and a militia that demands them freedom and courts. Politicians are just entertainment – they figure out what to do with the profits that they can steal from the people. That’s what politicians do. Ukrainians have never had freedom. Feudal serfs, Soviet Serfs, and now post-soviet cattle to be farmed for the benefit of those in power – in the Russian and Asian model. But for the ordinary people to have profits they must have credit and for credit they must have rule of law. And to have rule of law – all able bodied men must take up arms to demand it. A credible threat alone is enough to force it to happen. SLAVA UKRAINI Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine

  • On Ukraine and Prosperity – Liberty, Violence and Rule of Law

    [I]n the past two years the hryvnia has lost HALF of its value. Prices on everything are rising, while increases in employee compensation are not. All economies face this problem. Salaries are stickier than contracts, and contracts are stickier than prices, and prices are stickier than currency. So all changes in demand for currency around the world SLOWLY work through the economy ‘unsticking’ one thing after another. And salaries are at two edged sword: employees expect them to go up when currency loses value, but employees do not expect them to go down when currency gains value. ON UKRAINE In our case we have two problems. One, that the dollar is getting more valuable in the world, and two, that the Hryvna is getting less valuable in the world. And our people pay the consequences.

    • We can only fix Ukraine’s problem with credit.
    • We can only obtain credit with legal certainty.
    • We can only obtain legal certainty with rule of law.
    • We can only possess rule of law with judges who obey rule of law.
    • We can only possess judges with the rule of law if we can replace our judges – and for that matter, the entire court staff.
    • We can only replace the judges and the court staff with someone to force them out.
    • We can only force them out if the police to act upon it.
    • We can only expect the police to act upon it if they are also uncorrupt and respect rule of law.
    • We can only have police who are uncorrupt and respect rule of law if we fire them all and re-hire them again with higher standards, higher pay, and higher punishment for corruption – it must be wiser to collect a pension than to accept a bribe of any size.
    • We can only trust that they will be punished and stay honest if we have courts that enforce it.
    • And we can only have courts that will enforce it if we have juries to override the judges.
    • And we can only juries to override the judges if we have people who will act honestly on juries.
    • We will only have people who act honestly on juries once enough Ukrainians understand that all of Ukraine depends upon them and only them:
    • (a) sit a jury and enforce the law, even against friends and family.
    • (b) speak the truth even if it leads to your loss, and require it of others, and punish them if they do not.
    • (c) replace the government by armed violence until all of the above are enacted.

    [T]he only freedom logically possible is that which is obtained by a militia at the point of a gun. Everything else is just benevolent permission – not liberty. Ether a people is able to act as a militia (a militia means every living able bodied male) to demand these things of their government, or they aren’t able to act as a militia to demand these things of their government – or replace their government if needed. You get the government you deserve. All people possess the government that they deserve. Because no government can sustain universal insurrection, because no economy can survive universal insurrection. Some of us are willing to earn the form government we HOPE to deserve by our actions. The rest simply GET the government that they do deserve by their inaction. We are not yet willing to have the government we work to deserve. Because we are not wiling to evict the entire judiciary and police force – and that is what is required. A government is by its nature corrupt. There is no exception in the world – because a government is a monopoly, and the incentives for individuals in a monopoly all favor corruption. This is why governments must remain small – it is harder to steal when it is harder to be anonymous. So keep the number of people who of necessity must be corrupt and will be corrupt – to a minimum. The people must control the government. But if the people are immoral, they will have an immoral and corrupt government. If the people are moral, then they will have a moral government even if the government’s members are of necessity corrupt in one way or another. But the hard economic facts make political corruption irrelevant – it is judicial and police corruption that prevent the expansion of consumer credit.  The corrupt economy may be large, but that does not affect the individual citizens who merely need CONSUMER CREDIT. The assumption that citizens make is that they could obtain the monies that are siphoned off personally by corrupt government employees wither in the Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian and asiatic models, or whether they are siphoned off systematically as in the american and european systems, as inflated salaries special benefits, special pensions, absurdly expensive offices, and expensive equipment, or privileges granted to loyal constituents, businesses, organizations and lobbyists. Government people will ALWAYS siphon unearned wealth (corruption). That is what they do. They have no competition other than the militia (armed citizenry) to stop them. [T]he WEST is just as corrupt as the east – it is just systematized into sophisticated corporeal corruption not private corruption. What differs is that in the west, the citizenry has rule of law and therefore credit. So they live well because of their own private sector economy – even though the public sector is just as corrupt everywhere else. Ukraine must evict and ban all sitting judges, clerks and administration from the courts, and all do the same for all police officers. The best choice would be to import a few hundred young German, Scandinavia, and English speaking judges to interview, hire, and manage replacement judges. This would immediately, within one year, change the european perspective on Ukraine and credit. Georgia has already shown us how to fix the police. The problem then is not politicians that prevent us from prosperity WE MUST SOLVE THE RIGHT PROBLEM. The problem that prevents us from prosperity is that we are solving the wrong problem. Politicians are all corrupt. Judges and police who are paid a decent salary are all we need in order to build a prosperous Ukraine. As always the politicians will seek to siphon it off for their own corrupt use just as they do in the west. Just as they do everywhere. Because politicians are by necessity agents of corruption – even when they dont’ intend to be. They have no means of measuring what is ‘right’ other than ‘what they can get away with’. A child has no means of measuring what is right and wrong without a parent. A business has no measure of whether they efficiently serve the world except if they do not do so at a loss. And a politician’s only measure is what corruption can he get away with without voters, judges, police, and competing politicians to stop him. Freedom is created by courts and a militia that demands them freedom and courts. Politicians are just entertainment – they figure out what to do with the profits that they can steal from the people. That’s what politicians do. Ukrainians have never had freedom. Feudal serfs, Soviet Serfs, and now post-soviet cattle to be farmed for the benefit of those in power – in the Russian and Asian model. But for the ordinary people to have profits they must have credit and for credit they must have rule of law. And to have rule of law – all able bodied men must take up arms to demand it. A credible threat alone is enough to force it to happen. SLAVA UKRAINI Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine

  • ON THE METHODS OF CRITICAL RATIONALISM AND STOICISM COMBINED You know, I lucked

    ON THE METHODS OF CRITICAL RATIONALISM AND STOICISM COMBINED

    You know, I lucked out sort of. I solved a set of very complicated problems. I solved those problems only because my cognitive bias favored solution of them. As a mild aspie I cannot stand disorder, and raised in high conflict household I cannot stand conflict. There are always compromises (exchanges) to be made. It is these exchanges, when they are not obstructions or rent, that eliminate conflict. We must always understand that we cannot have perfection, only what we can have without costing the interests of others.

    I remember telling something like this to Walter Block many years ago “Sometimes I think I am just a child observing a machine inside me that god created for the sole purpose of solving a problem I am not even sure I can name or describe.”

    I look back at my work now, and I understand the import of it in the context of human history, and I understand how powerful an argument it is against the catastrophe let loose by the combination of the enlightenment, and the rapid expansion of scientific knowledge that we rationalize but is still, for us, very close to magic, and our reason cannot quite compensate for it yet.

    BACK TO CRITICAL RATIONALISM AND STOICISM

    A man will build character if he focuses on his works. He plans his day. He performs his day. He analyzes his success and failure for that day. And he repeats this process perpetually, without regard for confusing, competing nonsense that pervades human society – all of which is little more than an attempt to rally support for the purpose of persuading one group to prey upon another, or compete with another. All of which works by rallying framing and guilt. When in fact, if all of us merely focus on what it is that is in front of us, we would organize as we need to without attempts to circumvent those efforts with mere verbal deceptions and promises.

    WORKING IN THE COAL MINDS OF PHILOSOPHY

    I approach work very simply. I want to provide a language for conservatives, so that they can argue their ancient group evolutionary strategy in rational terms. I want to give them an argumentative means of resisting the tragedies that have been visited upon our people by all three of the enlightenment cultures – even though I consider the german of little more than a distraction, anglo universalism as a mere error, and cosmopolitan pseudoscience, obscurantism, overloading, lying, parasitism a second act of genocide against the western people as damaging as christianity: it takes advantage of our strength: trust and altruism – because we have extend the in-group kinship ethic to all – and turns it into a liability, by preserving the altruism but destroying the structure of our myths and language that require us tot ell the truth.

    Altruism is not a mindless general rule to be obeyed as an act of faith – it is a craft to be mastered and put to wise use – it is a local activity, limited to personal experience, that must be personally judged, and can never be centralized in the state, or church. It must always be limited to the individual and his voluntary decisions. The only thing that we can centralize is war, and the only certainty we can depend upon is truth-telling and a jury’s judgement of that truth, and the ruthless punishment of liars, obscurers and deceivers, and the careful cautious demand for restitution from those who merely err.

    So the cosmopolitan attack on the west – on made entirely out of unconscious perpetuation of pre-modern evolutionary strategy – is a specifically crafted, genocidal attack on western commons as a means of preserving ‘separateness’ which by its nature, without exception, is a violation of the very principle that drives western altruism – togetherness: the extension of in-group trust to all members of the polity and the demand for universal integration in extension for that trust.

    There is no such thing possible as liberty or freedom that is compatible with a state of separatism, because liberty requires equal contribution to the commons even if we do not provide equal contribution to production.

    We are either able to construct a uniform and unified, homogenous, and high trust polity, without exception or we must construct walls between us to prevent precisely this form of degenerate attack – this second genocide against the west. Either we are kin or we are not. If we are not kin, then we are competitors, for whom cooperation is merely a more productive means of conducting war.

    CRITICAL RATIONALSM

    I just work as a scientist does: I sort of stumble onto a theory, and the try to construct arguments. If I cannot construct an argument (a propertarian, operational argument – which would equate to a praxeological argument that also corresponds to the evidence) then I have to abandon it. Once I can construct an argument of any kind, then I must try to break it. If it survives breaking, then try to find its limits.

    The secret in this technique is to assume you know nothing, and just prosecute the idea endlessly. If it survives all that then it is a candidate.

    If it is a candidate and it seems not to conflict with all other candidates in the same degree of contextual precision, then it seems to survive every test I can put it to.

    This does not make the same assumptions as do critical rationalists (as I understand them) in that they do not require operational construction or testimonial truth and they think that platonic abstract truth matters rather than that we construct many puzzle pieces that fit together as a set of (sort of) interlocking gears or wrenches or levers, and put them to use to solve real world problems, rather than we even pay any attention to the fact that this particular set of pieces is the most parsimonious possible.

    Because economically that is nonsensical -and possibly one of the reasons why jewish civilization, despite its early literacy, accomplished nothing despite it’s centuries of advantage, while, every time westerners managed to circumvent levantine authoritarian verbalism and mysticism, within a few hundred years we developed science and reason, and technological revolutions.

    They had their own problems. I don’t criticize people for survival, I criticize our people for our stupidity – our humility. It’s unwarranted. It lets parasites claim that hey have high status. And it has led to our genocidal failure in this century.

    MORE

    More later since my headache is just getting out of hand… lol

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-07 10:43:00 UTC

  • THE GREATEST TRAGEDY IN HUMAN HISTORY ? (revised- updated – expanded – reposted)

    THE GREATEST TRAGEDY IN HUMAN HISTORY ?

    (revised- updated – expanded – reposted) (worth reading: replacing the evil religion with what?)

    RE: Lawrence Krauss says Religion Could Be Gone In a Generation.

    WHICH RELIGION?

    That presupposes that Democratic Secular Pseudoscientific Humanism isn’t also a religion. Which is what he presupposes. And what all of the members of the Cathedral presuppose.

    But, all things considered, there is no comparison between Christianity’s unification of Europe, or even the Stoic Schools, and:

    1) The death and destruction of Marxism led by the Academy, and the battle against it – resisted by the Academy,

    2) Keynesianism (reformed marxism) – led by the academy, and fought by religious groups;

    3) The cognitive, social, and normative damage done by postmodernism – led by the academy, fought by traditionalist groups;

    4) Anthropological, biological, and social pseudoscience and psychologism – led by the academy and fought by religious and traditional groups;

    5) The destruction of the law of property and the common law – led by the academy and fought by religious and traditional groups.

    6) The current pseudoscientific justification of democracy – led by the academy, and fought by traditional groups.

    7) The destruction of the family – led by the academy and resisted by religious groups.

    So if we critically, empirically, rationally, and scientifically analyze the comparative differences, then all that we would find, is that eliminating mysticism and replacing it with general rules, has made more effective workers. But in every other respect, religion and tradition have been superior to rational and pseudoscientific and immoral advocacy by the academy.

    THE ACADEMY AS IMMORAL PRIESTHOOD

    The academy functions as a religion because its central propositions – other than the nearly accidental success at disassembling the physical universe into general rules – are ALL FALSE.

    In fact, physical science used to justify all the other falsehoods of the Pseudoscientific democratic secular socialist humanitarian religion, despite the contrary evidence.

    THE ACADEMY PROFITS FROM SELLING IMMORALITY BECAUSE THE FILTERING OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION PROVIDES ACCESS TO JOBS.

    We don’t learn much in the university, other than how to cooperate with one another, and to work hard on complex tasks in the service of professors. This turns out to be fairly good training for white collar jobs, since these behavioral disciplines are what are necessary for survival in white collar work forces. However, that does not mean that subject matter we are taught is valuable – just the opposite. IN the work force, students use almost nothing that they learn from the subjects that they study in college, and they remember nothing of college afterwards.

    What they are taught does not serve society or industry – and arguable is in the disservice of the students. Because what they are taught does little but preserve the mythos of the Cathedral, the Academy and the State. It is an exceptional racket: to filter people by natural ability and teach them to work together, but teach them how to work together on immoral objectives.

    If instead of paying upfront for this defective product – a product consisting of a behavioral half truth, and a mythological suite of pseudoscientific lies – we instead paid for our educations from a percentage of our lifetime earned incomes. You would see the subject matter in the Academy change rapidly to suit the needs of the customer, rather than the fraud of the Academy and State.

    We have perhaps created the most perverse incentives in the world by sacrificing our parent’s retirements for an education that is harmful to our society, in every possible way, and has rendered our people incompetent to compete on the world stage, by the myth that a college education is the secret to wealth and prosperity, when in fact, your capability is the secret to your prosperity, the academy teaches you nothing, and is little more than a behavioral boot camp that tests your social, physical, and mental endurance at a very high price.

    How this state of affairs, where the academy sells parchments claiming you have knowledge, to pay for new buildings and more administrative personnel, is materially any different from the priesthood selling Indulgences claiming you are forgiven of sins, to pay for the construction of St Peters and an increase in the number of members of the priesthood hard to determine – primary because there is precisely no difference whatsoever. All that has happened by the rapid expansion of the costs of university education, is that teaching professors are both paid less, are less secure in their jobs, are deprived of tenure, and they have nearly disappeared from the academy, while bureaucrats have multiplied, endowments have multiplied, and the physical plant – the buildings – owned by the academy has expanded dramatically.

    Humans follow incentives no matter how perverse, and the academy, particularly once it could educate women, has done nothing but follow its perverse incentives. And it is impossible (I know) to argue otherwise.

    So the Cathedral: the academy and state religion, funded by the sale of modern indulgences in the form of a parchment – and constituting an organizational which persists by profiting both materially and in social status, from the sale of dysgenic reproduction, via the generation of hyper-consumption, and the consequential destruction of the family, is a religion.

    A religion wherein millions of horrid crimes against not only humanity, but western civilization, are justified by but one success – the success of physical science – over which the academy’s fallacies have no jurisdiction.

    The irony is suffocating.

    So. Yes. It would be wonderful if we could stamp out religion in one generation. Especially the religion of pseudoscientific democratic secular, socialist humanism. Which has finally succeeded in overcoming the christianization of Europe as the greatest tragedy in human history.

    ALTERNATIVES

    I have a wonderful suggestion. Why don’t we return to worshiping, as in, holding celebrations of remembrance for, our heroes in:

    1) Our Military generals and our statesmen.

    2) Our Philosophers, scientists and engineers.

    3) Our Saints, Caretakers, Healers, nurses, and mothers.

    4) Our Entrepreneurs, Capitalists, businessmen and laborers who struggle to raise us from poverty to prosperity.

    5) Our tribes and families which as kingdoms bear each other no offense, and every possible opportunity to learn.

    6) The planet that birthed, raised, loves and nurturers us, and upon which we depend.

    BUT WAIT!!!!

    Oh. Wait!!! That would mean returning us to our original european religion before the state imposed Christianity upon us by forcing closed the stoic schools and imposing the church upon us, in the same way that the academy and state have incrementally destroyed our churches, and imposed pseudoscientific, democratic secular socialist humanism upon us!!!!

    HISTORY

    History is the only thing worth celebrating. Our heroes the gods to speak to – meaning pray to. Because if we understand the lives of those heroes well enough, we will find that the answers to our prayers to them are already within us waiting to be heard.

    SCIENCE IS THE PRESTIGE – A DISTRACTING GESTURE BY WHICH THE LIARS JUSTIFY THEIR LIES

    Science is a ruse to distract us from history. The false dichotomy the liars have created is between the church and science, when it is between history, pseudoscience, and mysticism.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-05 07:15:00 UTC

  • Mises’ Position In Intellectual History

    MISES POSITION IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY? (reposted from elsewhere) (I think this will blow your mind a little bit.) Mises Human Action as Cosmopolitan Stoicism. [H]e was almost right. If Rothbard and the Rothbardians had not damaged his legacy so severely, he would not be ostracized by the main stream intellectual community. At present any mention of his name associates a public intellectual, an economist, or philosopher, with the pseudoscientific lunatic fringe. Praxeology is a failed attempt at Operationalism, sure – but no one ELSE came close to developing economic operationalism but Mises. I only did it because I have the luxury of a century of additional development in computability (especially Turing), and because it’s clear now that the analytic program (attempt to convert philosophy into a science) has been a failure, and that the success in reforming both science and psychology has almost entirely been because of Operationalism. Had Mises joined with Brouwer and Bridgman, the three of them might have saved us from a century of pseudoscience. But without a philosopher of ethics to unify them, Popper in the philosophy of science, Mises in Economics, Brouwer in mathematics, and Bridgman in physics all failed to come to the correct conclusion: that they were not in fact articulating logical constraints – because there is no logical constraint to theory-development. The logical constraint is only in the statement of promise (that you are telling the truth) that such a theory can be expressed existentially, as a sequence of operations (actions) or operational measures of observations. And as such, one’s theory, in any discipline, is free of content that was added by error, imagination, or deception. Man can testify to observation in the execution of recipes – all else is imagination. As such the practice of the sciences (or rather, the practice of *disciplined testimony* which the sciences developed, but which consists of nothing unique to the physical sciences) is a moral one, with ethical constraints. As such, praxeology, mathematical intuitionism, operationalism, operationism, Popper’s critical preference, and the scientific method, as well as the discipline of science as currently practiced, are moral constraints, not logical ones. One can intuit a theory by whatever means possible. One can believe whatever he wishes to justify. But one’s promise of testimony to the actions that did or may produce consequences is a moral one, not a logical one. [A]s far as I know, the only meaningful reason to study economics for use in ethics and politics, is to justify the rule of law (Nomocracy), under the single rule of property rights, where property rights is as defined under Propertarianism, as property-en-toto (demonstrated property). And where that body of law suppresses sufficient involuntary transfer of property-en-toto, that the formation of a Nomocratic polity is possible. And where the formation and perpetuation of that polity is possible, because transaction costs are sufficiently suppressed that a rational choice for Nomocracy is possible, over a rational choice for statism. And that the normative preference of nomocratic rule over statist rule is maintained by the constant exercise of that body of law in daily life, rather than a phillosophical-rational, religio-moral, pedagogically-instructional, or normatively-habituated means of persistence. If we look at his human action as an attempt to develop an economic version of stoicism – a mental discipline – I think it is probably a better frame of reference for his work than as economics or analytic philosophy. As such I see him as creating a Cosmopolitan version of stoicism (economic/intellectual character) rather than western (Aryan if you will) stoicism (political/craftsmanship character). Both forms of stoicism are early attempts at operationalizing philosophy for disciplinary action as an individual member of a complex division of labor in which we possess fragmentary information. Since I quote him endlessly for his analysis of money and fiduciary media, which again, he (“a sequence of human actions” = “operational observations”) correctly uses operational analysis to isolate and articulate the causal rather than normative properties – I am clearly an advocate. But I am not an advocate of the misuse of Mises’ errors – his failed attempt to develop economic operationalism – to justify Rothbardian libertinism – an outright assault on the production of both high trust, and the commons – both of which are the primary competitive advantages constituent in the western indo-european (Aryan if you will) evolutionary strategy. [I] walk by Mises’ childhood home every day. It has tempered my criticism. I see him making natural errors of Cosmopolitanism – as Hayek said “a victim of his upbringing”. Just as the Germans have made endless errors in conflating religion and philosophy to preserve their hierarchy and duty as a group competitive strategy. Just as British (Anglo/Irish/Scots if not the Belgae) have fought to preserve their island universalism despite the necessary suicide that results from universalism outside of their island (or the american island, or the Australian island.) I will venture this post is one of the more important things that has been written about Mises in recent history, and my arguments, if not my criticisms will assist us in RESCUING Mises from the lunatic fringe, and RESCUING his work for use in intellectual discourse – as the first attempt at saving Economics through operationalism, the way that science and psychology (if not also mathematics and logic) have been saved by operationalism. **I see myself as rescuing ALL of the Misesian/Hoppeian program from the fruitcake fringe: by laundering German, Jewish and British enlightenment fallacies – the attempt to universalize local evolutionary strategy – rather than simply adopt scientific epistemology (operationalism) as the only neutral tool for the use of studying group evolutionary strategies.** Although it is, I am sure, somewhat difficult for those religiously devoted to immoral, libertine, Rothbardianism to either understand or accept. I am quite sure I do not err in this analysis. A statement which I am aware further taunts libertines. But which my fellow aristocrats (libertarians-proper) both understand and expect from me as a promise. Because the anglo-empirical model of truth telling, quite opposite from the cosmopolitan, is that truth is the name for testimony. And as such I testify that to the best of my knowledge my statement is true. And that I bear the reputational consequences of my promise that this statement is true. This is the polar opposite of the Popperian, Analytic, and Cosmopolitan version of true: that truth is the unknowable province of god alone, and as such we can only ‘do what we can’, and as such are unaccountable for our words. This ethic, this definition of truth, as performative – as operational, is what Kant was searching for, but could not find. And it is why both Jewish and German philosophy are dead ends. And it is why english philosophy became lost through its influence by the germans and the cosmopolitans. We lost a century of philosophy to cosmopolitan pseudoscience in economics, politics, ethics and logic. Germans lost centuries to pseudo-philosophical religio-moralism. Mises can be seen in context as the most successful – if still failed – attempt to rescue german and cosmopolitan thought from its religious constraints. – Cheers. Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine