Source: Facebook

SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE

(good piece)

While I’d have to agree with Hoppe that Hayek didn’t focus enough on property rights, and did focus too much on psychology (like all good classical liberals), his study of the institutions of law are decidedly NOT pseudoscientific.

Hayek’s work is hard to describe as failure, because it certainly was an improvement in intellectual history, even if he didn’t identify the causal properties of cooperation. But he did give us the arguments for necessity of the common law and the constitution.

There is a very great difference between SCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Weber, Hayek, Kronecker, Poincaré, Brouwer and PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Marx, Freud, Cantor, Russell, Keynes, Mises, Popper and Rothbard.

What does it say about us that we don’t remember those scientific failures but we are attracted to pseudoscientific arguments like moths to the sociological flame?

Is that because it is more comforting to rely upon the promise of the pseudoscientific and non falsifiable, than the promise of the scientific that is demonstrable as failure?

A study of our history knowledge doesn’t tell us that. It tells us the opposite. That when we prove something is false that is when we know something that is true – that our idea was false. When we obtain new explanatory power we love to make use of it like a child with a new toy – rarely testing it. We love our pseudosciences.

Hayek didn’t give us pseudoscience. Like Newton he was accurate but imprecise.

Curt Doolittle

Kiev.

— notes for later —

Weber was right that the advancement of civilization requires multiple special disciplines of ‘calculation’ such that

Mises was right that a fundamental problem was economic calculation.

Hayek was right that a fundamental problem is information.

Hayek was right that simple rules are necessary

Hayek was right that the common law and the constitution are required rules and rule systems.

Rothbard I think was just plain wrong outside of his history.

Hoppe was right as far as he took his arguments – which was pretty far. (Although I really wish he’d give up on argumentation.)

MISES WAS JUST WRONG : APRIORI VS FALSIFICATION

Mises was a victim of the Jewish enlightenment (just as Hayek suggested) and could not escape pseudoscientific text and verbalism endemic to Jewish culture. He failed to give us the logic he ‘sensed’ that describes human action by attempting to suggest that, like jewish fanaticism, it was possible to conduct deduction from first principles. It is not.

It is however possible for all humans to TEST statements reduced to some analogy to experience by way of logics or instrumentation. This “universal-ness”: the marginal indifference in human incentives – is the source of logic: reduction to perception.

So we can either reform praxeology by correcting it through inversion from a form of deduction to an empirical method of testing the rationality of incentives, or we can discard praxeology as a failed attempt at creating logic of cooperation that underlies all economic activity.

My preference is to give Mises credit by REFORMING praxeology, which would have the benefit of undermining the remaining body of pseudoscientific libertarian dogma that, because it is actually immoral in content, HINDERS the progress of liberty by providing the same false hope that ALL scriptural pseudo rational, pseudoscientific methods of inquiry do. We must remember that ratio-scientific investigation, meritocratic evolution norms, meritocratic evolution of common laws, and meritocratic circulation of elites, are slow and expensive methods of change. And that pseudoscience and pseudo-rational arguments are simply attempts to obtain some end at a discount on the expenditure of effort necessary to achieve that end empirically (by empirically, I mean “demonstrably”).

I would also prefer to discredit all of Rothbard’s pseudoscientific ghetto pseudo scientific while preserving his historical contributions to the history of fiat money and credit. His critique of the State, as that of Mises’ is a significant contribution to the criticism of political thought. However neither Mises nor Rothbard contributed what did Hoppe: a solution to the problem of formal institutions. The three men, Mises, rothbard and Hoppe, did manage to give us our first attempt at the formal logic of cooperation. Albeit, like all Continentals they failed to provide it in anglo-empirical and therefore scientific terms.

So my preference is to reform libertarianism and give credit to their contributions – contributions I have obviously made use of.

And that is my objective.