(religious trigger warning) [K]ant understood the central value of the west was truth speaking. But Kant was still a Christian – arguing in unscientific language of morality. He was not able to make the leap from truth to jury, law, science and economics. We face the same problem with Today’s Christians. Traditionalists often hold proper sensibilities and express them in the language of belief, rather than the language of institutions, incentives, law, and economics – the art of cooperation rather than totalitarianism that requires submission in all the monotheistic religions, and which demands we abandon truth in favor of useful analogy. What traditionalism requires is submission – and in exchange one gains freedom from the burden of perpetual calculation of events. The value of religion – still measurable today – is that it is increasingly valuable as intelligence decreases. And decreasingly valuable as intelligence increases. Religious authority obviates need for reason. Truth, science and reason obviate the need for authority. So we really have two choices: we can have two systems of thought: scientific and mythical, while insisting that the mythical contain moral content only, with full knowledge that the scientific method is aristocratic and libertarian in construction and the mythical narrative is proletarian and authoritarian in construction. Or, we can suppress the reproduction of the lower classes and merely pay them off until there are so few left that their cost is below noise level. (Spoken as a Catholic myself.) Source: Curt Doolittle
Source: Original Site Post
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The End of History: It’s The Truthful Civilization, Not Democracy. (Sorry Francis)
(profundity of the day)(read it)(propertarianism provides the wilsonian synthesis)
[I]f I am correct, and that the reason for western rapidity of innovation, economic velocity, and intellectual progress, is the prevalence of truth telling in all walks of life; and that truth telling begets truth-thinking; and that truth-thinking leads to multitudinous goods – faster than all other institutional solutions; then why are not truth-speaking and truth-thinking as radical an innovation as literacy and reading?
(I am pretty sure it is.)
Oath-giving was expensive. Juries were expensive. A senate is expensive. Rule of law was very expensive. Literacy was terribly expensive. Science was expensive. High trust was very expensive. Yet these investments in our commons are the very reasons that westerners produce every good faster than all competing civilizations in both the greco-roman and re-enlightened eras.
We succeeded in incremental suppression of all free riding, and incremental increase in normative taxation – bearing costs for the production of norms.
If we require the payment of truth telling, no other innovation in institutions can compete with it.
Once we have implemented truth telling as common property with universal standing, then we can eliminate the centralization of parasitism in the state: monopoly bureaucracy. We will have successfully suppressed local parasitism and eliminated transaction costs by centralizing parasitism as a means of paying for the transition. Then eliminated the central bureaucracy as a means of parasitism. We can then – and only then – finally live in a nomocracy: under rule of law.
This simple act will result in the ‘scientific civilization’. It will complete the enlightenment attempt to restore our western civilization to its hellenic and indo european origins – rescuing it from babylonian mysticism forever. Not because people ‘believe’ one thing or another. But because we have eliminate all opportunity to, and utility in, doing otherwise.
(And if that isn’t the most profound argument you’ve run into this year I’ll be surprised.)
Source: Curt Doolittle – THE END OF HISTORY: THE SCIENTIFIC (TRUTHFUL)…
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The End of History: It’s The Truthful Civilization, Not Democracy. (Sorry Francis)
(profundity of the day)(read it)(propertarianism provides the wilsonian synthesis)
[I]f I am correct, and that the reason for western rapidity of innovation, economic velocity, and intellectual progress, is the prevalence of truth telling in all walks of life; and that truth telling begets truth-thinking; and that truth-thinking leads to multitudinous goods – faster than all other institutional solutions; then why are not truth-speaking and truth-thinking as radical an innovation as literacy and reading?
(I am pretty sure it is.)
Oath-giving was expensive. Juries were expensive. A senate is expensive. Rule of law was very expensive. Literacy was terribly expensive. Science was expensive. High trust was very expensive. Yet these investments in our commons are the very reasons that westerners produce every good faster than all competing civilizations in both the greco-roman and re-enlightened eras.
We succeeded in incremental suppression of all free riding, and incremental increase in normative taxation – bearing costs for the production of norms.
If we require the payment of truth telling, no other innovation in institutions can compete with it.
Once we have implemented truth telling as common property with universal standing, then we can eliminate the centralization of parasitism in the state: monopoly bureaucracy. We will have successfully suppressed local parasitism and eliminated transaction costs by centralizing parasitism as a means of paying for the transition. Then eliminated the central bureaucracy as a means of parasitism. We can then – and only then – finally live in a nomocracy: under rule of law.
This simple act will result in the ‘scientific civilization’. It will complete the enlightenment attempt to restore our western civilization to its hellenic and indo european origins – rescuing it from babylonian mysticism forever. Not because people ‘believe’ one thing or another. But because we have eliminate all opportunity to, and utility in, doing otherwise.
(And if that isn’t the most profound argument you’ve run into this year I’ll be surprised.)
Source: Curt Doolittle – THE END OF HISTORY: THE SCIENTIFIC (TRUTHFUL)…
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Due Diligence Necessary For the Warranty of Truthfulness
[D]ue Diligence necessary for Warranty that our Testimony is Truthful.
1) Have we achieved identity? Is it categorically consistent?2) Is it internally consistent? Is it logical? Can we construct a proof(test) of internal consistency?
3) Is it externally correspondent, and sufficiently parsimonious? Can we construct a proof (test) of external correspondence.4) Is it existentially possible? Is it operationally articulated? Can we construct a proof (test) of existential possibility? And is it free of imaginary content when we articulate it as such?
5) Is it limited? Do you know it’s boundaries (falsification)
6) Is it fully accounted? Do we account for all costs to all capital in all temporal and inter-temporal dimensions? (Have we avoided selection bias?) Can we construct a proof (test) of full accounting? (Is information lost or artificially gained?)7) Is it morally constrained? Does it violate the incentive to cooperate? (Meaning, are all operations productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers, free of negative externality of the same criterion?)If you cannot answer these questions or do not understand them you cannot know if you speak the truth, or if you are polluting the commons with fantasy, bias, error, or deception.Source: Curt Doolittle
(Ed: Note: Updated June 26 to reflect addition of warranty #5.) -
Due Diligence Necessary For the Warranty of Truthfulness
[D]ue Diligence necessary for Warranty that our Testimony is Truthful.
1) Have we achieved identity? Is it categorically consistent?2) Is it internally consistent? Is it logical? Can we construct a proof(test) of internal consistency?
3) Is it externally correspondent, and sufficiently parsimonious? Can we construct a proof (test) of external correspondence.4) Is it existentially possible? Is it operationally articulated? Can we construct a proof (test) of existential possibility? And is it free of imaginary content when we articulate it as such?
5) Is it limited? Do you know it’s boundaries (falsification)
6) Is it fully accounted? Do we account for all costs to all capital in all temporal and inter-temporal dimensions? (Have we avoided selection bias?) Can we construct a proof (test) of full accounting? (Is information lost or artificially gained?)7) Is it morally constrained? Does it violate the incentive to cooperate? (Meaning, are all operations productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers, free of negative externality of the same criterion?)If you cannot answer these questions or do not understand them you cannot know if you speak the truth, or if you are polluting the commons with fantasy, bias, error, or deception.Source: Curt Doolittle
(Ed: Note: Updated June 26 to reflect addition of warranty #5.) -
The Cost of Eliminating Pseudoscience in Economics
(Please tolerate the long post. Some ideas are not reducible to pithy wit.) (1000 words) (important piece)
RE: https://growthecon.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/more-on-mathiness/
[I]f a statement in economics cannot be reduced to a sequence of subjectively testable rational operations, then it cannot be true – it is not existentially possible. If a statement in economics can be reduce to a sequence of subjectively testable rational operations, then whether it is true or not is still open to question. The philosophical problem (epistemic truth) of correcting pseudoscience (of which mathiness is a subset) in the field of economics is not something that is going to easily be solved by economists, who tend to be good at neither advanced mathematics, nor the ethics of science, nor at the principle problem of truth. And this is a serious problem. Because, of all the disciplines save psychology, economics is the **most subject** to pseudoscience: the failure to eliminate imagination, bias, error and deceit. And we have the greatest incentive to insert imagination, error, bias, and deceit. And among all the scientific disciplines, the social sciences have been the most subject to pseudoscience other than perhaps philosophy itself (which in truth is objectively a social science). We have not yet developed the warranty that the hard sciences have developed, or that psychologists have developed. And this is in no small part because in economics, the warranty that we must give is much broader, and places a much higher burden on authors, because the scope of our statements is much broader in influence than that of our peers in other fields. [D]ue Diligence Necessary For the Warranty of Truthfulness: 1) Have we achieved identity? Is it categorically consistent? 2) Is it internally consistent? Is it logical? Can we construct a proof(test) of internal consistency? 3) Is it externally correspondent, and sufficiently parsimonious? Can we construct a proof (test) of external correspondence. 4) Is it existentially possible? Is it operationally articulated? Can we construct a proof (test) of existential possibility? 5) Is it fully accounted? Do we account for all costs to all capital in all temporal and inter-temporal dimensions? (Have we avoided selection bias?) Can we construct a proof (test) of full accounting? 6) Is it morally constrained? Does it violate the incentive to cooperate? (Meaning, are all operations productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers, free of negative externality of the same criterion?) If you cannot answer these questions or do not understand them you cannot know if you speak the truth, or if you are polluting the commons with fantasy, bias, error, or deception. Why is it that the informational commons, and by consequence the political and normative commons, are not – in an age of information – as subject to warranty and liability as pollution (“Abusus”) to physical commons, life, body, and private property? Truthfulness – testimony that has been subject to due diligence – is a non trivial cost. And economists are too happy (as it appears all social scientists have been) to produce defective products for personal gains, without the warranty that all other products have been subject to. Why is it that free speech is not limited to free truthful speech? After all, the cost of producing truthful scientific testimony under due diligence and warranty is much higher than the cost of producing untruthful pseudoscientific testimony without due diligence or warranty. Doesn’t mere free speech without warranty of due diligence of truthfulness construct an impossibility under which the production of high cost truth and the production of low cost fantasy, bias, error and deceit must eventually win? There is a great difference between the terms “empirical” (observable and measurable) and “scientific” of which empirical criticism is but a minor subset of the criterion necessary for the production of warranty of due diligence against fantasy,bias, error, and deceit. We have had a century of economists running with intellectual scissors, causing inter-temporal externalities of profound consequence. And the Cosmopolitan (freshwater) rationalist’s justification of priors is only more visible than the mainstream Anglo empirical (Saltwater), justification of priors under the pseudoscience of Rawlsian justificationism – itself a fascinating example of the logically impossible, yet pervasively persuasive. So just as all enlightenment adaptations were plagued with errors – anglo, french, german and jewish – both freshwater and saltwater economics are plagued with pseudoscience. The freshwater try to justify objective morality, by argumentative construction (pseudoscience), and the saltwater try to justify immorality by intentionally failing to account for profound normative, institutional, civilizational, and genetic consequences (pseudoscience). So it’s one thing for all of us to point the finger of the accusation of pseudoscience one place or another. But it is quite another to realize that the minute you draw the lens of truth upon either freshwater or saltwater economics, you will discover that both are pseudosciences that merely confirm ideological priors. This is probably the most important remaining problem in the philosophy of science. I set out to debunk the pseudoscience of libertarianism (cosmopolitan libertarianism, not anglo libertarianism) and to refute the postmoderns as masters of pseudoscience. And I did. But I did not set out to reform economics. And in truth, I have less interest in reforming economics and social science than I do in reforming law and politics – the sciences will merely follow incentives. But Paul Romer lit the kindling, and perhaps this is the time to solve the remaining problem of science. If we do it will be the most important reformation of thought since the enlightenment. Because our errors – our priors – are all errors of the enlightenment. And that is because the enlightenment was incomplete. We can complete it. But only if the utility of truth is more valuable than the utility of pseudoscience. And I am suspicious of that assumption. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. @paulromer #mathiness
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The Cost of Eliminating Pseudoscience in Economics
(Please tolerate the long post. Some ideas are not reducible to pithy wit.) (1000 words) (important piece)
RE: https://growthecon.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/more-on-mathiness/
[I]f a statement in economics cannot be reduced to a sequence of subjectively testable rational operations, then it cannot be true – it is not existentially possible. If a statement in economics can be reduce to a sequence of subjectively testable rational operations, then whether it is true or not is still open to question. The philosophical problem (epistemic truth) of correcting pseudoscience (of which mathiness is a subset) in the field of economics is not something that is going to easily be solved by economists, who tend to be good at neither advanced mathematics, nor the ethics of science, nor at the principle problem of truth. And this is a serious problem. Because, of all the disciplines save psychology, economics is the **most subject** to pseudoscience: the failure to eliminate imagination, bias, error and deceit. And we have the greatest incentive to insert imagination, error, bias, and deceit. And among all the scientific disciplines, the social sciences have been the most subject to pseudoscience other than perhaps philosophy itself (which in truth is objectively a social science). We have not yet developed the warranty that the hard sciences have developed, or that psychologists have developed. And this is in no small part because in economics, the warranty that we must give is much broader, and places a much higher burden on authors, because the scope of our statements is much broader in influence than that of our peers in other fields. [D]ue Diligence Necessary For the Warranty of Truthfulness: 1) Have we achieved identity? Is it categorically consistent? 2) Is it internally consistent? Is it logical? Can we construct a proof(test) of internal consistency? 3) Is it externally correspondent, and sufficiently parsimonious? Can we construct a proof (test) of external correspondence. 4) Is it existentially possible? Is it operationally articulated? Can we construct a proof (test) of existential possibility? 5) Is it fully accounted? Do we account for all costs to all capital in all temporal and inter-temporal dimensions? (Have we avoided selection bias?) Can we construct a proof (test) of full accounting? 6) Is it morally constrained? Does it violate the incentive to cooperate? (Meaning, are all operations productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers, free of negative externality of the same criterion?) If you cannot answer these questions or do not understand them you cannot know if you speak the truth, or if you are polluting the commons with fantasy, bias, error, or deception. Why is it that the informational commons, and by consequence the political and normative commons, are not – in an age of information – as subject to warranty and liability as pollution (“Abusus”) to physical commons, life, body, and private property? Truthfulness – testimony that has been subject to due diligence – is a non trivial cost. And economists are too happy (as it appears all social scientists have been) to produce defective products for personal gains, without the warranty that all other products have been subject to. Why is it that free speech is not limited to free truthful speech? After all, the cost of producing truthful scientific testimony under due diligence and warranty is much higher than the cost of producing untruthful pseudoscientific testimony without due diligence or warranty. Doesn’t mere free speech without warranty of due diligence of truthfulness construct an impossibility under which the production of high cost truth and the production of low cost fantasy, bias, error and deceit must eventually win? There is a great difference between the terms “empirical” (observable and measurable) and “scientific” of which empirical criticism is but a minor subset of the criterion necessary for the production of warranty of due diligence against fantasy,bias, error, and deceit. We have had a century of economists running with intellectual scissors, causing inter-temporal externalities of profound consequence. And the Cosmopolitan (freshwater) rationalist’s justification of priors is only more visible than the mainstream Anglo empirical (Saltwater), justification of priors under the pseudoscience of Rawlsian justificationism – itself a fascinating example of the logically impossible, yet pervasively persuasive. So just as all enlightenment adaptations were plagued with errors – anglo, french, german and jewish – both freshwater and saltwater economics are plagued with pseudoscience. The freshwater try to justify objective morality, by argumentative construction (pseudoscience), and the saltwater try to justify immorality by intentionally failing to account for profound normative, institutional, civilizational, and genetic consequences (pseudoscience). So it’s one thing for all of us to point the finger of the accusation of pseudoscience one place or another. But it is quite another to realize that the minute you draw the lens of truth upon either freshwater or saltwater economics, you will discover that both are pseudosciences that merely confirm ideological priors. This is probably the most important remaining problem in the philosophy of science. I set out to debunk the pseudoscience of libertarianism (cosmopolitan libertarianism, not anglo libertarianism) and to refute the postmoderns as masters of pseudoscience. And I did. But I did not set out to reform economics. And in truth, I have less interest in reforming economics and social science than I do in reforming law and politics – the sciences will merely follow incentives. But Paul Romer lit the kindling, and perhaps this is the time to solve the remaining problem of science. If we do it will be the most important reformation of thought since the enlightenment. Because our errors – our priors – are all errors of the enlightenment. And that is because the enlightenment was incomplete. We can complete it. But only if the utility of truth is more valuable than the utility of pseudoscience. And I am suspicious of that assumption. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine. @paulromer #mathiness
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The Movement Against Pseudoscience Continues
[T]heories of perception not fact.
—“We suggest that most theories about political effects of inequality need to be either abandoned or reframed as theories about the effects of perceived inequality”—
h/t bryan caplan http://www.nber.org/papers/w21174.pdf Source: (1) Curt Doolittle
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The Movement Against Pseudoscience Continues
[T]heories of perception not fact.
—“We suggest that most theories about political effects of inequality need to be either abandoned or reframed as theories about the effects of perceived inequality”—
h/t bryan caplan http://www.nber.org/papers/w21174.pdf Source: (1) Curt Doolittle
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Definitions: Truth, Truthfulness, and Honesty
[D]EFINITIONS OF TRUTH.TAUTOLOGICAL TRUTH: That testimony you give when you promising the equality of two statements using different terms: A circular definition, a statement of equality or a statement of identity. ANALYTIC TRUTH: The testimony you give promising the internal consistency of one or more statements used in the construction of a proof in an axiomatic(declarative) system. (a Logical Truth). IDEAL TRUTH: That testimony (description) you would give, if your knowledge (information) was complete, your language was sufficient, stated without error, cleansed of bias, and absent deceit, within the scope of precision limited to the context of the question you wish to answer; and the promise that another possessed of the same knowledge (information), performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony. (Ideal Truth = Perfect Parsimony.) TRUTHFULNESS: that testimony (description) you give if your knowledge (information) is incomplete, your language is insufficient, you have performed due diligence in the elimination of error, imaginary content, wishful thinking, bias, and deceit; within the scope of precision limited to the question you wish to answer; and which you warranty to be so; and the promise that another possessed of the knowledge, performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony. HONESTY: that testimony (description) you give with full knowledge that knowledge is incomplete, your language is insufficient, but you have not performed due diligence in the elimination of error and bias, but which you warranty is free of deceit; within the scope of precision limited to the question you wish to answer; and the promise that another possess of the same knowledge (information), performing the same due diligence, having the same experiences, would provide the same testimony.Intuition: (sentimental expression) – an uncritical, uncriticized, response to information that expresses a measure of existing biases (priors).Preference (rational expression) : a justification of one’s biases (wants). Opinion: (justificationism) – a justified uncritical statement given the limits of one’s knowledge about external questions.Position: (criticism) – a theoretical statement that survives one’s available criticisms about external questions.Demonstrated Preference: – Evidence of intuition, preference, opinion, and position as demonstrated by your actions, independent of your statements.A Hierarchy of Truths:
- True enough to imagine a conceptual relationship
- True enough for me to feel good about myself.
- True enough for me to take actions that produce positive results.
- True enough for me to not cause others to react negatively to me.
- True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion among my fellow people with similar values.
- True enough to resolve a conflict without subjective opinion across different peoples with different values.
- True regardless of all opinions or perspectives.
- Tautologically true: in that the two things are equal.
TRUTH IS A WARRANTY OF DIFFERENT DEGREES.Source: (1) Curt Doolittle