Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Climate Data, Trust In Science, Secular Humanism, Truth, and Economics

    The crisis over climate data has been met with numerous statements about preserving the “sanctity” or trust in the wisdom of science and scientists. As if our scientists were an improvement over their theological predecessors, or their pragmatic and prostituting peers in politics. But that can hardly be true, if one understands the history of science, or the scientific method and it’s limits, or the behavior of human beings belonging to schools of thought, in history. People are driven by material gain, status, and power, and have significant cognitive biases in favor of those selfish traits, that appear in all aspects of human behavior, not just in politics, commerce, or religion, but also in science. My position has been, along with many, that it certainly appears as though the data says the climate is cooling, along with it’s normal historical ice age cycle. The public does not trust academia, or the scientific community. It does trust particular scientists who are also public intellectuals. THe press likes to trust and advocate science because secular humanism has become today’s religion. In an effort to counter scholastic religion, secular humanists frequently tolerate what it considers acceptable losses. But given that, due to current events, we know most mathematical economics since the second world war is faulty, because the logic behind it was faulty. Because they sought to justify government intervention in the economy by monetary policy: Something Hayek believed was the intellectual’s fascination with their levers and their desire to run tests on society to experiment with their efficacy. And there are numerous other ‘givens’. Given that over nine tenths of research papers contain logic errors that invalidate their conclusions, whether in physical science or social science. Given that it at least appears that the peer review method of publishing articles is becoming invalidated when compared to the more difficult job of writing books that require broader integration of a paper into a network of theory. Given that our universities are rated by input rather than output criteria, and that this bias has material impact on society. Given that it certainly appears that there is a great deal of ’skewing’ in the community, on top of the pervasive errors in the logic of conclusions. Given that academic departments are not materially meritocratic, but political – and radically so. Given that we produce large bodies of research that are faulty and repeatedly proven faulty whenever they aspire to affect the political debate, in order to make it easier to obtain grants. Given that academia does not separate teachers from researchers, and that students see their best teachers evicted from universities, for what appears to be political interests of intrenched parties, and all of us who are educated walk around with this knowledge and experience. It becomes somewhat hard to understand why the public should believe in the myth of scientific ethics. Scientists pursue self interest, just like the rest of us. But there are no checks on that self interest when the testing criteria for that self interest is obscured by all the behaviors above. The rest of us are tested by the market. And it appears that the market is a much better test. Scientisim has replaced theology as a means of influencing policy. But I’m not entirely sure it’s all that much better than arguing about angels on the head of a pin. It certainly seems we should be at least as skeptical of our scientists as we were of our theocrats. And perhaps more so.

    Adam Ozimek Curt, The scientific community is a market; a market of ideas. You should not put more stock in individual scientists or “public intellectuals” than in scientific consensus and the market of ideas in which consensus if forged and challenged. The market for ideas is as competitive, self-interested, and as meritocratic as most other free markets- all of which share problems like you cite above.

    @Adam “The market for ideas is as competitive, self-interested, and as meritocratic as most other free markets- all of which share problems like you cite above.” That *cannot* be true. The market has no claim to truth, nor is it a weapon of political coercion. It is ultimately and entirely pragmatic, and the means by which we fill each other’s wants by the pursuit of self interest, at the lowest cost, despite the fact that all people seek to game, or circumvent that market whenever possible. Markets exist, and always have. The state has generally, created sufficient stability so that markets can evolve in a fashion in which only the government molests them. And the government molestation is determined as good or bad only by how it redistributes the profits of its molestation: to itself or to the public. A public who must also fail to molest itself by interfering with trade or property, as well as refrain from molestation of the state. But, the moment that ideas are used to influence government policy, they make claims to truth. Our concept of truth is as a method of coercion. In the context of this discussion, which was the public TRUST in the scientific community, trust must imply truth not pragmatism. Otherwise the conversation is meaningless.

  • Flashlights, Power Grids, Institutions of Calculation, Pride and Human Frailty

    The difference between the schools of quantitative and behavioral of economics consists largely in which errors they choose to accept in furthering the utility of their craft. Each of these schools masters a set of conceptual levers with which they seek to solve problems. Or more realistically, the people in the school learn levers, and define their schools by the limits of those levers. They explore their field with levers. They do not necessarily even understand, or agree upon the problem they are solving with those levers. Often, they redefine the problem by the levers at their disposal – a form of unintentional circular reasoning that is rarely evident except in retrospect. A lever is something that they can use to run a test. Testing is the sensory tool of science. But more clearly, methods and their tests are extensions of human perception. Think of them as an insects antennae. They sense whatever they are designed to sense. But it is up to humans to synthesize that new sensory data into a cogent whole. The problem occurs when our specialists become so enamored of their sensors that they bias their perception of the whole, as something designed to be explored by the sensors at their disposal. Like any school of thought, the limits of that school are determined by the methodological scope of it’s levers, what effects they ignore, or what priorities the school’s practitioners give to which effects either considered or ignored. Most often, practitioners become enthralled with the levers they best understand. These ignored effects, and preferred levers, constitute errors. THey must be errors, if they eliminate or ignore information — information that may be either influential to the test, or influential to secondary causes. My favorite response by economists is “… but we don’t consider that economics, so we dont consider this a problem for us to solve.” When in fact, economics is simply the school of measurement of the social sciences, when we choose to make material improvements in life — due to the increasing division of labor and resulting decrease in prices – our method of determining political policy. Economists then ignore the secondary causes of their research: they seek to justify a tool, rather than follow a chain of causation. In the quantitative (abstract) and experiential (experiential and logical) schools of economics, participants either err on the side of understanding human behavior in favor of models that support levers of government intervention, or they err on the side of understanding that there are consequences to policy in the absence of knowledge about secondary causes. The difference in priority between the quantitative and the behavioral, is simply the priority that each gives to it’s methods. They seek to solve the problem from different ends of the human spectrum. For example, the behaviorists did not understand the stickiness of prices and contracts over time, nor the importance of having sufficient money in the system, nor the problem with their concept of freedom, its relation to property, property to calculation and incentive, or the epistemology that property permits humans to employ. The quantiatives did not understand number of very important things, primarily the nature of entrepreneurship, the limits of the DSEM (dynamic stochastic equilibrium model) the nature of what numbers can represent as categories given that factors of production, and even all objects in human experience, have different utility at different times. Nor did they understand how important habitual knowledge, (traditions and habits) are in society, and how quiclky humans forget them when they are not of daily use due to social programs or credit money, inflation, or taxation. Nor did any of them understand that the problem we faced was the nature and dependence of society on human calculation itself, and that accounting practices, government by and laws, as well as the democratic system of government, are effectively laundering useful causality from the pricing system, as well as distorting it through the use of excess credit money. This axis of differences between abstract quantitative and experiential logical is intersected by those people that err on the side of institutional conservatism as a protection against fashion or err on the side of institutional change as a means of altering society by way of its institutions of cooperation and conflict resolution. However, both ends of teh spectrum ignore either the opportunity for change in preference for risk against institutions, or ignore the impact on institutions in favor of experimental change. And these differences are not minor or meaningless. It is the difference in the philosophy of giving people tools by which to better themselves and others, by fulfilling wants, and rewarding those who do so, and the opposite camp, which desires to change the status of humans at the discretion of the political managers who can achieve the power to pull the levers of their choice, and create class conflict over the spoils of productivity gain. The debate rages. However, it appears, at least after cautious study of the history of ideas, that experiments that extend our institutions of calculation are those that are material investments in humanity. And those that are more fashionable, are minor adjustments to class, power, and material randomness as we fitfully pursue life. Our problem is not economics. It’s calculation. Our political system is destroying our ability to calculate – because it’s members do not understand the underlying problem of human calculation, nor the need to modify government to facilitate it. That change, that one change, is the single most important modification we need to make to our institutions. Redistribution becomes calculable under that model. Class warfare becomes unnecessary. And to support Durkhiem, it prevents the state from suppressing freedom and individuality, because it no longer needs to, nor does it need to be a costly behemoth sitting on top of our society, nor can it, because it’s worth would be measurable. That is the methodology that we need: measurement of causality. Prediction is simply a silly chimera to compensate for the lack of information because we launder causality from our political efforts, and to justify the pulling of levers of government through taxes and laws because we lack that measurement and the information it contains. And if my argument appears to favor both sides, yielding confusion rather than clarity, it is because we must continue to compensate for the practical reality of human frailty and foible, while creating institutions that allow us our political expression as a vent for our frustrations, while building a set of institutions that make our society increasingly calculable, comparable, forecastable, perceivable, and thusly one of cooperation in a division of knowledge and labor. But we must not, ever, think that politics is more than a vent for the resolution of conflict between groups. Our society is it’s institutions of calculation. Our fitful political rhetoric an amusement and distraction that rails against our lack of control over them, while at the same time our prosperity entirely dependent upon them. And we must constantly monitor our schools of thought, as well as our own fantasies, so that we are not so enthralled in our pride, that we forget that we are inventing our future, not discovering it, and that each of these methods, schools of though, political systems, is a flashlight in the dark, and our institutions of calculation the power grid that keeps them lit.

  • Simplicity Is a Relative Measure, Not A Test Of Truth

    A left-leaning blog-squatter on Economist’s View repeatedly makes requests for simplistic reasoning, thereby making his level of understanding, that by which all rhetoric should be judged: a measure which is obviously arbitrary.

    All expressions are increasingly abstract evolutions of directly experiential concepts, and perceived simplicity in communication is a function of the commonality of experiences shared by the participants. (Hence the still misunderstood nature of evolution as undirected.) Insight just is the opposite – the communication of unseen patterns – or insight would not be a scarcity and therefore of value, or notice. Quantitatively measured categories require presupposed invariance in the category definition (the variables), while the qualitative nature of human choice, the content of human memory from experience which determines the interpretation of ‘facts’, both serve to undermine such analysis. Our native method of calculation is to use effort, property (objects of utility) and time. Numbers simple help us fine tune our perception and measurement. Next, history and it’s data are correlative assumptions without an underlying theory of causality described by human action. Historical correlation of events is simply an updated variation of the will-of-god. Facts are not facts unless they have a theory and correlation is not a theory. Mathematics is not causal, only narratives are causal. Narratives are only causal if they are expressed as a chain of human actions which are testable by the application of behavioral norms and comprehensible incentives. So correlative political statements attributing policy to resulting economic factors are not necessarily causal, especially given the time delay. Furthermore, external factors that are more influential than policy must be included or eliminated lest we attribute cause to symptom. For example, the much repeated error on this board attributing 90’s success to Clintonian policies rather than the lack of those policies interfering in the speculative growth technology, and the fall of the soviet model, and the rise of the chinese model. Politicians have few short term levers. And they are largely punitive (tax and law) or positive (credit) but they have many long term levers Unfortunately our system encourages them to act for the short term, and so does the ideology of class warfare under the rubric of ‘equality’, given the material differences in human capacity for production in a post-agrarian world. So if this is a forum for political advocacy of a position independent of such understandings, then that’s one thing, but as I understand it, it’s a forum for the discussion of economics, which, as a young and not well understood science, is of material consequence, since economic productivity has replaced religion and moral conformity as the means of compelling one group or another to the bidding of the others by the application of the violence of government through physical, tax, or credit (tax) means. In other words, many people are make assumptions in order to support a confirmation bias, and rely upon a requested simplicity where none exists, and if it does exist, it does so by requiring that events, and causes, be perceptible to the individual, when the entire reason we have economies and institutions and habits and quantitative tools is to extend that perception, which is naturally limited to property and perceived utility.

  • From The Private Sector: We Don’t Need Stimulus We Need Credit

    1) From the private sector: We don’t need stimulus we need credit. Banks simply wont lend. While the process of correcting bank balance sheets is underway, that same process must occur in small and medium sized business before any turnaround can occur. In my largest company’s case, our banks have been failing gradually, and we have been cost cutting, not because of decline in profitability, but because of decline in borrowing capacity, and an inability to find new banks willing to lend. About 20% of the work force was affected. In the other company I own, we are experiencing similar problems. 2) We need an area of growth that creates opportunity, and we need it in an area where we can CREATE DEMAND by innovating (taking risks by trial and error). Demand is not simply naturally derived from abstract confidence, it is created by investment, risk, promotion, advertising, and sales. People consume according to stimuli and status attainment. But they have to be aware of opportunities for stimuli and status attainment. And we must constantly develop new products to inspire them to work, risk, borrow and spend. The government is not stimulating anything that will help us CREATE demand. For example, building power plants, or a new power grid, which reduce costs and allow us to compete by discounted power cost rather than discounted labor cost. It is creating further expenditure requiring infrastructure. This is of course, a temporary fix, that is a long term drain on the economy. Instead, stimulate the creation of opportunities. Or at least, understand that there are a minimum of three classes 1) banking and finance, 2) entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, and 3) clerks, laborers and craftspeople, and that stimulus generally helps the first and the last, but the middle is where the job creation comes from. And fundamentally, the entrepreneur cannot borrow today. Entrepreneurs, while often called capitalists are rarely possessed of a lot of capital. They are possessed of the ability to unite capital, knowledge and resources (including labor) in pursuit of opportunity for mutual gain. 3) Fixing the problem of an incalculable economy (loss of consumer confidence because of decrease in anticipated opportunities, and therefore disincentive to risk money and credit) is repaired most easily by having the government fund banks to buy back depreciation in home prices, and refinance those new homes, preserving the equity of the homeowner. THis would return to government (the treasury) the accountability for their actions in flooding the economy with unproductive credit, and the resulting distortionary prices.. This one policy enactment (which a number of us tried to promote in the spring of 08) would have the most efficient and quickest effect on changing consumer confidence because it can occur fast enough that the stickiness of wages and prices can correct. Countering uncertainty requires acting on debt reduction (home balance sheets) faster than the contracts (wages and prices) can be renegotiated in the private sector, which is a collection of promises and agreements and habits between individuals. Of course, the old argument is this: everyone wants to use stimulus to build roads because they require unskilled labor, and therefore have an immediate effect on the least flexible people in the economy. But these roads have to be maintained perpetually, and high cost, and generally are not. When, planes on the other hand cause the opposite reaction. Then the question becomes, not just one of redistribution, or debt, but urgency, and motivating all of the productive classes of finance, entrepreneurship and labor, to work together. Not focusing on just one or another, but all three. This is one of the other failures of the bias that comes from overemphasis of monetary policy: forgetting that we have to move all three classes of people in order to stimulate the economy.

  • An Environmental Software Company?

    In May, one of my business partners asked me to rescue a bit of software development that was a joint venture between a prominent politician’s environmental activism foundation, a very large software company, and one of our smaller businesses. It took me until July to weed through two years of chaos and deception to understand that we were losing millions on the effort, that neither customer was being honest with us, or even with each other, and that the entire effort was a financial and political catastrophe. Besides that the software was unusable. Not for want of technical talent. It’s was because the politicians mistakenly believed that they could be product managers – skills that are incompatible. I’ve spent the late spring and most of the summer building a new business and attempting to right the many wrongs done by these people, to our company and others, in particular, to a global organization named ICLEI, which consists of local governments working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now, I am not a climate activist, and I’m actually a skeptic. It’s not that I don’t want to reduce emissions. I do. But the reason I got involved was because I simply cannot morally tolerate myself, my business partners, and some very good, and hard working environmental activists, who are simply trying to make the world into a better place, get walked on by denizens of the evil empire whose only real purpose seems to be giving capitalism a bad name, while in the mean time, harming their company’s brand, and all for personal ambitions. So, my work on Capitalism 3.0 has been delayed because I’ve had to launch a new business, and right what I feel are injustices by doing so. It seems that it’s acceptable to the Green movement to have a skeptical capitalist involved as long as he’s on their side. A marriage of convenience so to speak. All I know is that I haven’t met anyone involved in the climate issue that isn’t a good person. And I can’t say that for the people who caused me to get involved by their errant and greedy behavior – masked as activism. I find them insufferable. So those political activists both left and right, who look at me askance when I tell them I am a major stockholder in a Green business, should understand that you have your religions and I have mine: I don’t like to see people abused, and especially under the cloak of public service.