Curt Doolittle

Form: Quote Commentary

  • MORE ON MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM (For me. Pls ignore.) “Famously, Tarski (1936) pr

    MORE ON MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM

    (For me. Pls ignore.)

    “Famously, Tarski (1936) proved that no classical formal language could contain its own truth predicate, due to Liar’s paradox. As such, if we want to include a truth predicate, we are committed to a hierarchy of languages. Moreover, if consisting only of formal languages, this hierarchy does not collapse: at no level will a language Lm provide a truth predicate for a language Ln, where n ≥ m.”

    CD: Yes, but I can see that this is starting to go south already, confusing sets with semantics…

    “If one is not committed to strict formalism, there are far less

    problems with Tarskian truth. In particular, the hierarchy of

    languages can be collapsed. There are two ways of doing this. One

    can either move from formal to informal languages – where Tarski’s

    undefinability result does not hold in the strict sense – at some

    point in the hierarchy, or one can hold some level in the hierarchy

    to be of the language-to-world type. Philosophically these two

    strategies are largely equivalent, since we seem to have no way of

    describing the world outside language. This makes the job a lot

    easier for the non-formalist. Rather than try to explain a

    problematic relation between mathematical languages and mathematical reality, we can concentrate on characterizing the

    connection between our formal and pre-formal mathematical

    languages.”

    “What proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal. We

    deal with mathematical proofs syntactically, but at the same time

    we as human beings think about them semantically.

    CD: Yes.

    “We cannot deny pre-formal thinking, and its need for semantical truth. However, this alone is not enough to show a substantial difference between truth and proof. Even though the existence of pre-formal mathematics cannot be reasonably contested, there is always the possibility that when it comes to truth, it is essentially superfluous; whatever we can achieve with truth, we could also achieve with proof alone.”

    CD: First, there is a very great difference between truth and proof if mathematics is platonistic and set based. But if it is marginally indifferent and non-platonic then there is no difference. So that’s my concern. But the question I have is, what externalities are produced? It’s a moral question. I know that’s hard to grasp. But a biologist who plays with viruses and a mathematician that teaches platonism both export risks onto others.

    “The second problem that the lack of reference causes for

    formalism is one that does not require semantical arguments, or

    indeed any sophisticated philosophical devices.”

    CD: I do not see that as a problem. Nor do I see the need for, or desire for, formalism.

    “It could be plausibly claimed that human thinking as we know it could not exist without some mathematical knowledge.

    CD: yes, this is correct. But the reason is not stated here.

    “But if mathematics has absolutely no reference, what reason do we have for picking one theory over another? It must be remembered here that this reference does not have to mean anything resembling a Platonic universe of mathematical ideas. Simply put, if we believe that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 3, we must believe in some kind of reference. (It must be noted that I do not mean to use “some” as a hedge word here. My point throughout this work is that the relevant dichotomy is reference against no reference, rather than no reference against Platonist reference.)”

    CD: Yes, but if you wrote the argument as human actions in operational language you would not have this problem – which is purely linguistic. And obscurely so.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 14:25:00 UTC

  • THE ASIAN-WHITE-ASHKENAZIM GAP “In 1989, the Law School Admission Council commis

    THE ASIAN-WHITE-ASHKENAZIM GAP

    “In 1989, the Law School Admission Council commissioned a study of bar passage rates. Its report, The LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study was published in 1998, with results disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Linda F. Wightman, the project head, collected data from more than 27,000 students who entered ABA approved law schools in fall 1991. The study found that only 80.75% of Asians passed the bar on the first try compared with 91.93% of non-Hispanic whites. This corresponds to a white-Asian mean-score difference of 0.53 standard deviation or in IQ terms a verbal gap of 8 points”

    Basically, we’re in the middle between Jewish verbal aptitude and east Asian spatial aptitude. Specialization matters.

    The advantage we have is in ethics.

    We have such a thing as universal ethics.

    They don’t.

    Our advantage is predicated on maintaining a certain amount of the population with an IQ over 106, and preferably over 115, in control of property and institutions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 06:08:00 UTC

  • NOTES ON MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY “…Mathematics is an established, going concern.

    NOTES ON MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY

    “…Mathematics is an established, going concern. Philosophy is as shaky

    as can be.”

    CD: This seems quaint, as it is meant to seem quaint by the author to illustrate the point. However, the problem of philosophy is one of “intermediacy”, rather than ends. To incorporate new discoveries and ideas into our system of thought. To develop some means of conceptual commensurability. WHile in the past, all domains were at some point parts of philosophy, the success of philosophy has been at casting off those domains. At present, the only remaining domain philosophy addresses is that of the commensurable integration of knew ideas into our body of knowledge. For this reason, philosophy, like money in the calculation plans, makes the moral and ethical world of action commensurable despite the disciplinary differences in method and goal. It may be that all philosophy does is protect us from catastrophic errors that may cause us harm, rather than provide any particular innovation. But the works of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Smith, Hume, Jefferson and Darwin are evidence enough that at times, our entire systems of thought must be reordered, and new values attached to causes and consequences. Or by contrast, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger and Rorty, who have tried to do the opposite: To restore immoral obscurantism as a revolt against modern empirical thought.

    “a distinct history in which philosophical theories of mathematics have not been required to conform to the practice of mathematics”

    CD: True, but I’m not doing that at all. In Propertarian ethics, I place no constraint on the practice of mathematics. We constrain only what can be SAID about mathematics, for ethical and MORAL reasons. I think that this is the problem that the various Revisionists have tried but failed to address: that philosophy is a social science, and mathematics is a pattern science, but when mathematicians speak of their discipline in public, or to students, or in writing, they are entering the public domain. In all manner of life we place limits on private activity if it has public consequences. In particular, we constrain the conceptual, verbal and physical creations of moral hazards. My criticism of mathematics on Propertarian grounds is not how math is practiced, it is the justification used in mathematics to explain it’s platonism-of-convenience, which in turn, as a matter of public discourse, creates the hazard of mystical platonism.

    So if the only constraint is that you must not communicate moral hazards, and that this merely alters the language of your justifications, then this is an internal cost that you may not morally export onto others just because it is convenient to do so.

    “One of the most important forms of revisionism in philosophy of mathematics of the latter part of 20th century has been extreme (strict) formalism (nominalism), and its ontological conclusion, Hartry Field’s (1980) fictionalism. According to it mathematical objects do not exist, and the formal axiomatic systems that form the core of mathematics do not refer to anything outside them. In other words, for the extreme formalist rules of proof and axioms

    are all there is to mathematics.”

    …

    “One main purpose of this work is to show that we do not. In this work that is called the problem of theory choice, and I will try to show it to be the most fundamental problem with strict formalist philosophy of mathematics. Simply put, I will argue that when taken to its logical conclusion, extreme formalism implies completely arbitrary mathematics: we would have no reason to prefer one set of axioms and rules of proof over another. That is a staggering conclusion, but we will see it is the only one that can be plausibly made if we reject all outer reference from mathematics. Fortunately it never comes to that, since mathematics without any outer reference does not make sense. We need to explain why we prefer some rules of proof and some axioms to others, and without any concept of reference this cannot be done. In this work I will argue that without any outer reference, mathematics as we know it could simply not be possible: it could not have developed, and it could not be learnt or practised. Sophisticated formal theories are the pinnacle of mathematics but, philosophically, they cannot be studied separately from all the non-formal background behind them.”

    CD: Agreed. It is impossible to escape correspondence between method and reality. But lets see where the author takes this…

    “In contemporary philosophy of science there is a visible emphasis on what may be called the sociological aspect. Rather than following the Carnapian ideal of neatly structured formal scientific theories, we are now more convinced that the actual practice of science should also have its mark in the philosophy of science. Overall, this is a healthy development, even though it has sparked off less than healthy theories where philosophy of science has become a bastardized form of sociology of science.”

    CD: I am a bit troubled by the difference between philosophy of science as a pursuit of truth and the sociology of science as moral and practical counsel. If they are not materially different then this statement makes sense. If instead, that philosophical pursuit of truth is substantially different from the moral and ethical pursuit of social inquiry then I think that this is a failure to understand the function of philosophy as commensurable and ethical, rather than consisting of metaphysical truths.

    “We seem to have a great deal of humility toward the methods and practices of

    physicists, but in mathematics we reserve a different, much more powerful and revisionist, role to philosophy. It is hard to see the reasons behind the difference in approaches. Perhaps it is because most philosophers of mathematics are more familiar with mathematics than philosophers of physics are with their subject. Modern physics requires, as well as a great deal of expertise, access to a lot of expensive equipment. Mathematics, for the most part, only requires the expertise. In this way most philosophers cannot understand the nature of modern physical inquiry as well as the nature of mathematical inquiry.”

    CD: I think the author is mistaken, just as philosophers are mistaken. The philosophical criticism of mathematics is precisely over its abandonment of correspondence and our failure to state the method of correspondence. I see philosophical criticism in the Revisionist and Intuitionist movements as moral objections to the recreation of magic and those criticisms, even if poorly conducted, poorly articulated, are correct. I don’t want to claim that Propertarianism solves this problem I simply think that propertarianism makes it possible to determine the cause of conflict between philosophers and the platonism of classical mathematics. That philosophers mistakenly see their discipline as the pursuit of truth rather than commensurability of systems of recipes is the causal problem. The criticism of the morality of mathematical platonism stands.

    “While ontologically minimal, extreme formalism makes mathematics impossible as a human endeavour – which is much more alarming than any intricate philosophical problems. In a nutshell, I will argue that if extreme formalism were correct, mathematics could not have developed in the first place – nor could it be practised today. It must not be forgotten that mathematics is a human endeavour just like all other sciences. If something is essential to mathematics as a human endeavour, we would seem to have good reason to believe it is also a factor in the philosophy of mathematics – or at least something we should expect a theory in philosophy of mathematics not to conflict with.”

    CD:I’m not sure where he’s going with this. I agree with the argument that there must be some sort of correspondence in mathematics, and I have argued that this correspondence is reducible to the practical limits of the human mind, which mathematics serves to compensate for. And I think that’s a sufficient argument when combined with commensurability and moral constraint. But perhaps I will learn more from the rest of the paper.

    Right now, I must go to the office and do my other job. 🙂

    https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/19432/truthpro.pdf?sequence=2

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 03:39:00 UTC

  • WATCH: RESISTANCE TO SPENDING FROM 2010 People do not want to invest in infrastr

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/build-we-wont/KRUGMAN WATCH: RESISTANCE TO SPENDING FROM 2010

    People do not want to invest in infrastructure in the midst of a class war, even if it’s battles are conducted by policy rather than by violence. People do not have faith in the government. They cannot have faith in the government, because we have too disparate a set of interests.

    You’re approaching the problem from the wrong direction. There is no ‘We” any longer. The use of factions and class warfare to undermine the old class, race and cultural power base was successful.

    If people do not own their government, or feel that it represents them, then it is an external entity. They’re acting as if it is.

    There is no “We”.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:52:00 UTC

  • WATCH – FROM 2010 Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That consti

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/lacking-all-conviction/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

    Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That constituency is profoundly either conservative and/or moderate. Liberals are, and likely always will be, a small minority of the population.

    As a politician in a Democracy, when your constituents of all flavors start calling, contributing to others coffers, and reducing contribution to yours. When key contributors call with displeasure. When mail full of fury piles on your desk. When lobbyists start spending time with the opposing party. When the friends and allies you need to gain political support at home start abandoning you, then you have a certain perception of reality.

    Democracy is not getting what you want. It’s getting what the majority of people want. Not even what the party in control wants. But what the majority of people want.

    The political information system is not ideologically based except in the popular press. It is extraordinarily functional in practice – the construct of alliances of people of different desires and ideals. The political economy is run by donations and relationships. These people know what’s said in the popular press. But they live in the political economy of relationships and donations. That’s their ‘reality’. That is their ‘pricing system’: the information system that they rely upon.

    They are not stupid. They are not cowards. They are pragmatic. And the voters are telling them what they think: that the country is center right. And voting against the previous administration was not voting for this one. And this administration did something few have done, and none should do: pass ideological legislation over the objection of the majority.

    THis congress will fall. And the president will either move toward the center. Or he will be out in two years. And while he is a weak character, he is probably not stupid enough to stay so far left. And he has lost his legitimacy with the populace and as such, oratorical appeals to left agendas will only serve to undermine his power further.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:45:00 UTC

  • WATCH – FROM 2010 (Posted for archival purposes) Small business people? Hardly.

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/soros-obama-and-me/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

    (Posted for archival purposes)

    Small business people? Hardly. That writing provides a limited return is not a measure of its level of consumption by a large number of customers, but a measure of how little people are willing to pay for it.

    The term Mitch is looking for is not “entrepreneur” it is “Schumpeterian Intellectuals”: people who bring about the destruction of capitalism, the market and the prosperity of national competitiveness by undermining both the sentiment of, and capital structure of entrepreneurship.

    Unfortunately, we don’t have special taxes for Shumpeterian market destroyers like we have special taxes on entrepreneurial market creators. But we can fix that. Perhaps we should level the playing field by heavily taxing political, extra-market goods and services, and lowering taxes on apolitical intra-market goods and services?

    Wouldn’t that be a switch? I mean, why should the amount of income be the axis of measurement, rather than the service provided to the market? Under that measure we could confiscate all of Soros’ money, recover our losses from the bloated financial sector, and reduce the media to non-profit status, and make political writing an unprofitable exercise.

    As for putting capital to a better purpose, that’s not yet proven. Soros was not participating in the market for goods and services by creating unemployment and reorganizing that capital. He’s just using remunerative coercion under state protections. And extra-market remunerative coercion at that. A form of coercion made possible only by the restraint of violence by others in order to create the somewhat free market – a restraint he does not himself employ. And while that asymmetry of restraint may not be apparent to your cult of those who are incapable of holding territory and trade routes, or building an durable government, or durable institutions of calculation and cooperation, it is not lost on those of us whose ancestors have done so for a millennia or more.

    It seems odd to me that so many people fail to grasp just how entertaining and enjoyable civil war is for those people who practice militial restraint – often at high personal cost of forgone opportunity. Modern war is a ‘hell’ only for people who fight in the western model. It’s not for warriors, terrorists and raiders. We forget that the reason we cannot conquer the Afghans is in no small part because raiding and killing are actually enjoyable, entertaining, status-enhancing pass times among practitioners. And creating markets and property rights, and philosophy and econometrics, is a poor substitute.

    Then, perhaps some of us should put our capital stock of violence to better use, if in our restraint, we are disabused by men who simply take advantage of our creation – the market. It would be the optimum use of our asset.

    Or those who put their financial capital stock, or political capital stock to such uses, could pay the opportunity cost of restraint, so that we do not have to. And can continue to devote our energies to the proxy of entrepreneurship and company building instead of the more enjoyable and rewarding use of our capital stock of violence.

    🙂

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:42:00 UTC

  • RECAPTURE: FROM FEBRUARY 2008 – ON THE CRISIS 1) In order to sustain that spendi

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/defining-the-macroeconomic-problem/KRUGMAN RECAPTURE: FROM FEBRUARY 2008 – ON THE CRISIS

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/defining-the-macroeconomic-problem/#comment-19177

    1) In order to sustain that spending you seek, and support reorganizing both production and consumption, all these groups need impetus that it no longer appears policy can quickly reorient. Our tools seem to have exhausted their usefulness:

    -Monetary Policy and Bureaucrats

    -Traders (private sector)

    -Institutions (commercial banks and insurance)

    -Merchants (Distributors)

    -Producers (theory, capital and production cycle)

    -Ordinary Consumers and Their Daily Spending Habits

    -Interpersonal Networks (intertemporal theories)

    -Common Sense and Traditions (long wave theories)

    2) I would like to understand why we don’t just put the onus back on the debt market by authorizing a new set of banks or bank divisions to issue home loans at some fractional value, and forcing the previous lending institutions to write off the debt, rather than letting people get forced out of homes and have their equity destroyed – especially if the problem was created by monetary policy in the fist place.

    If the asset bubble will evaporate anyway, why pay the knowledge-cost and related stresses? Instead, why not simply force the issue and make consumers elated (and make them into spending consumers) because of it. What you do to refinance the write downs is paid one way or another – either by market losses or by buying out the bad debt. But this is the only method by which I can see we can affect the entire chain of human behavior quickly and positively without paying the dreadful cost of uncertainty over a period of four or five years. (Roughly what I am able to calculate it will take – not the two years I see others coming up with.)

    The problem I see on the horizon is the limited innovation going on in the economy outside of healthcare, and even that is under threat. This coming period of contraction and consequent distraction is time we cannot afford to lose. We need to be competing and we need to channel money into innovation rather than home construction. (This is a lengthy topic in it’s own right.)

    There must be some variant of this solution that would be sufficient. Imagine all homeowners reducing their mortgages by two thirds, or perhaps better said, simply refinancing DOWN and retaining their equity, as often as possible, and what that would do to the economy. (I cannot go into detail on a blog but this is a solvable process.) Raise interest rates and give ourselves room to control inflation rather than deflation, which is the only choice we really want to make.

    I understand the natural objections but hiding this deflation inside of market processes will still yield the same result and the consequential shock will be very hard on the average person. Demographically, I am very concerned that if we don’t do something like this many people will simply not recover their financial lives. Ever. There are just too many people too late in life with too little savings, and the savings they have in their homes looks like it is rapidly going to evaporate. They cannot afford the double loss of equity and earning remaining lifetime earning potential as all this works out — time being the ultimate scarce capital we all have to work with.

    Cheers

    — Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:40:00 UTC

  • AN HONEST AUTHOR “Like most books …, this one is two-fifths analysis, two-fift

    AN HONEST AUTHOR

    “Like most books …, this one is two-fifths analysis, two-fifths criticism, and one-tenth polemic. … This leaves but a tenth or so of the manuscript for constructive proposals.” – Benjamin Barber (author)

    Seems about right. 🙂 Most books can be summarized in 2500 words or less, and their entire contributions in 500 or less. Everything else is sales, justification, and defense.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 19:58:00 UTC

  • “Down on the street, I interpret a lot of what Krugman says, to mean “make it/ma

    “Down on the street, I interpret a lot of what Krugman says, to mean “make it/manufacture it/produce it it doesn’t matter if you can sell it for a profit or sell it at all, hell stash it in a warehouse until the aliens come, the idea of production is to transfer money to employees, not to sell things and make profit”. Shiit straight out of the old Soviet Union.”

    -George White

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 13:14:00 UTC

  • “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die bet

    “To every man upon this earth

    Death cometh soon or late.

    And how can man die better

    Than facing fearful odds,

    For the ashes of his fathers,

    And the temples of his Gods.”

    HEROISM

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 10:22:00 UTC