THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK: IT ALL BEGINS WITH WAR [I] really want the history of economics to hold the social science’s intellectual high ground. But the fact of the matter is, that after consuming most of intellectual history, in hundreds of books, the most important book on social science that I have ever read remains The History of Warfare by Keegan. It is a work of insight, depth and scholarship that none of the religious, social, political or economic historians have come close to matching. We live our warfare first. That is the foundation of our civilizations. Everything else rests upon it – and more importantly, everything else depends upon it. Our ability to deny others control over geography, determines our ability to construct institutions, which determines our ability to accumulate capital. All property is constructed after all, from the ability to deny others use of that which we claim a monopoly of control over. All prosperity depends upon the formation of property rights. And all property rights depend on the organized application of violence.
Theme: Causality
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THE CONSPIRACY OF GENETIC WHISPERS 1) A cacophony of genetic whispers. 2) Intuit
THE CONSPIRACY OF GENETIC WHISPERS
1) A cacophony of genetic whispers.
2) Intuition as propagandist for genes.
3) Consciousness as the victim of propaganda.
4) Reason and will as advocate for consciousness.
5) Communication as negotiation for our genes.
6) Negotiation as opportunistic cooperation in support of our genes.
You know, academia, religion, media and advertising work by framing, then overloading: by saturating your environment with messages designed to produce a behavioral end. If there is enough saturation in the environment it becomes almost impossible to ignore the stimuli. We have difficulty compartmentalizing environmental stimuli. (Although smarter people much less so than average and below average people – in fact, smarter people have a hard time sensing saturation, and merely take advantage of the circumstances.) So framing and overloading overwhelm our skepticism and reason – especially when we perceive it as advantageous to make use of the falsehood rather than to determine whether it is true or not.
Libertarians are interesting because we are the most moral people – the people least likely to impose costs upon others. That morality is our genes whispering to us too.
But like all other victims of overloading by genetic whispers, we fallaciously assume that it is rational for others to adopt our genetic strategy. It is not. It is rational for others to adopt THEIR genetic strategy.
What we have right, is that all have equal chances of pursuing their genetic strategy without harming the genetic strategy of others, if we cooperate on means, even though we cannot cooperate on ends. This will suppress the least fit genes, and expand the better, if not most fit genes (excellence doesn’t really spread as much as ‘good’.) At present we are murdering (genocide) the better genes to fund the worst genes, in the greatest consumption of genetic capital in human history.
This cannot continue. And if it does, it will turn out that our genes were wrong.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-26 03:32:00 UTC
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DEHUMANIZING BUT INTELLECTUALLY LIBERATING – HUMANS ARE COOL. Once you understan
DEHUMANIZING BUT INTELLECTUALLY LIBERATING – HUMANS ARE COOL.
Once you understand that human existence is reducible to acquisitiveness, and that all emotions are merely chemical reactions to changes in state of our extant acquisitions, our anticipated acquisitions, and our potential acquisitions, then you readily adopt the habit of ignoring your intuitions in a search for meaning, and simply looking at all of human experience economically: as cooperation for the purpose of acquisition.
What people think say, believe and justify becomes meaningless verbalism – negotiation both honest and deceptive, and nothing else. Everyone’s purpose is some form of acquisition. Even if it takes the form of acquiring time to relax that is not spent in material acquisition. Thinking of humans so mechanistically, with our emotions as mere reward-machines, is somehow dehumanizing. But on the other hand it’s intellectually liberating. The world is much more comprehensible.
I tend to see our existence as a reasonably successful struggle against the dark forces of time and ignorance. And I celebrate our ability to miraculously cooperate in large numbers, despite the fact that we are all super predators entirely capable of simply killing and eating each other if we choose to.
I don’t know what else in the universe is more amazing than that. And I don’t need the vastness of space, the mystery of physical science or some abstract mysticism to feel spiritually about it: Humans awe me. 🙂
Humans are cool. 🙂
Curt Doolittle
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-22 03:39:00 UTC
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THINKING (SEARCHING) VS REASON AND INDUCTION (from elsewhere) Matt Dioquardi is
THINKING (SEARCHING) VS REASON AND INDUCTION
(from elsewhere)
Matt Dioquardi is very clear here, and I wanted to save this quote for my own reference. But it’s so good it’s worth sharing.
For those who follow science more so than philosophy, you might note that David Miller’s “thinking” is equivalent to Kahneman’s “searching” with “System 1”.
While in any deduction the information must be present in the extant statements, Induction is logically nonsensical since the information cannot be present for it to function. But we do add information to any question when we perform our acts of free association. This action is not rational, as in “System 2” thinking, but we do intuitionistic searching for possible relationships with “System 1” thinking. To the computer-science savvy mind, this is an obvious process we are familiar with. But I suspect prior generations conflated the two or gave precedence to reason which is subject to reflection (we can observe) over searching (intuition) which is not subject to reflection (we can’t observe it). When the evidence is now, that we do a lot more searching (its faster) than we do reasoning (it’s slow and expensive).
QUOTE:
—“One could argue that we need a manner of going from particular data points to a general theory — and that this is the problem of induction. One could simply say, I don’t understand how we do this, even though we do this. There’s a fine line where someone could *reject* induction philosophically, but still argue for it methodologically … the problem is then perhaps formulated as trying to explain why we methodologically accept induction, but reject it philosophically … something like that …
Or one could argue that even once we have a theory, we need some type of confirmation of that theory, and so this is the problem of induction.
There’s no end to the manner in which one can argue we still have a problem here — and so we still need to find a solution. I’m not clear on this, but I think there are ways in which Bayesianism can be formulated so that it can be argued that it makes no use of induction — though I’m suspicious about this claim.
But putting all this aside, I think the methodology Popper presents, if accepted, simply does away with these problems. They cease to exist. So there is no problem of induction. There’s no inductivist problem. Induction is simply misguided from the get go. It posits a *justificationist* requirement where one is never needed.
Of course, if one wants to argue Popper is wrong, then that’s a different issue …
Even on the issue of “problem finding”, I think what David Miller states in his essay, “Do We Reason When We Think We Reason, or Do We Think?” might be relevant. He addresses the issue of schools that want to teach “critical thinking”: “— Matt Dioguardi
LINK: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/associates/miller/lfd-.pdf
As a now-committed operationalist, I have some difficulty with Miller’s approach. Formal logic is not operational. But he seems to consistently come to the correct conclusions. And this paper is evidence of that fact.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-21 03:49:00 UTC
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SIMPLE ARGUMENT WHY WE APPEAR TO BE ALONE —“This cosmic time scale for the evo
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.3381.pdfTHE SIMPLE ARGUMENT WHY WE APPEAR TO BE ALONE
—“This cosmic time scale for the evolution of life has important consequences: (1) life took a long time (ca. 5 billion years) to reach the complexity of bacteria; (2) the environments in which life originated and evolved to the prokaryote stage may have been quite different from those envisaged on Earth; (3) there was no intelligent life in our universe prior to the origin of Earth, thus Earth could not have been deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens; (4) Earth was seeded by panspermia; (5) experimental replication of the origin of life from scratch may have to emulate many cumulative rare events; and (6) the Drake equation for guesstimating the number of civilizations in the universe is likely wrong, as intelligent life has just begun appearing in our universe.”—
The “We might be the first” argument isn’t irrational.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could become ‘the ancients”?
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 06:09:00 UTC
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All Law Is Theoretical, And All Laws Merely Theories
[W]hat we have learned about humans from the discipline of science is that we must always adhere to two rules, in articulating any theory, because ALL LAW is a theory, and is bound by the same constraints as scientific theory. Revision of law, is equally a revision of theory, bound by the same constraints as all theory. Those two rules are: — a) Calculability and; — b) Operational language. In the context of law, ‘Calculability’ is a property of Empiricism (observation) that refers to the necessity that all monetary actions are made visible – and therefore there is a prohibition on pooling and laundering data through the use of aggregates. This implication is vast, and applies to all laws in all circumstances. For example, taxes are pooled into general funds, and their use discretionary, rather than taxes (fees) are collected for the purpose of particular contracts, and when those contracts are complete the taxes (fees) expire. Cause and effect are broken. Laws are not contracts that expire. They must be. Otherwise they would be ‘incalculable’.
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All Law Is Theoretical, And All Laws Merely Theories
[W]hat we have learned about humans from the discipline of science is that we must always adhere to two rules, in articulating any theory, because ALL LAW is a theory, and is bound by the same constraints as scientific theory. Revision of law, is equally a revision of theory, bound by the same constraints as all theory. Those two rules are: — a) Calculability and; — b) Operational language. In the context of law, ‘Calculability’ is a property of Empiricism (observation) that refers to the necessity that all monetary actions are made visible – and therefore there is a prohibition on pooling and laundering data through the use of aggregates. This implication is vast, and applies to all laws in all circumstances. For example, taxes are pooled into general funds, and their use discretionary, rather than taxes (fees) are collected for the purpose of particular contracts, and when those contracts are complete the taxes (fees) expire. Cause and effect are broken. Laws are not contracts that expire. They must be. Otherwise they would be ‘incalculable’.
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THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL The logic of human action is not
THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION IS PURELY EMPIRICAL
The logic of human action is not deductive. The logic of human action, including the discipline of economics, is entirely empirical. Empirical meaning ‘observable’.
The canons of science require that we use instrumentation and logic to reduce that which we cannot sense to analogy to experience; that we test what we cannot perceive for internal consistency and external correspondence.
But, we can test the rationality of incentives directly by pure perception. Our perception of voluntary exchange, involuntary exchange, and the satisfaction of wants is in itself the most reductive form of perception: we can both sense the rationality of incentives in relation to any change in state, and we can test the rationality of the incentives of others as well – because human incentives are marginally indifferent – at least outside of taste. Even then we can distinguish between rational tastes and non.
As such, the logic of human action is constructed from, as all knowledge of truth is, empirical observation.
Source date (UTC): 2014-03-03 05:19:00 UTC
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Metaphysics vs Science
(worth reading) –“Curt, loved your brief defense of praxeology earlier on (below). This is off subject but like Katherine, I too am curious in what way metaphysics failed and science is now close to triumph. An example or two please? We can go off line if you like.”– Pat Pat, This is the largest and most controversial topic in philosophy. And I find that I lose pretty much everyone when I try to address it. So I don’t think I can do it in a couple of examples. I can given an analogy between the problems of constructive/intuitional mathematics, the requirements for scientific argument (which are moral constraints actually), the problem of inconstant relations in economics, and the difference between truth and proof. And that forms a basic language for discussion. Since that conversation requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of multiple disciplines It seems that the argument is quite hard to make even if done in long form. BUT TRYING ANYWAY The best I can do is state that imagination can only be tested by action – external correspondence. And our understanding of of our actions tested by internal consistency. And the veracity of our internal consistency by our understanding of construction. As such, our logical methods allow us to construct instruments which assist us in testing correspondence, internal consistency, and construction. Albeit, while internal consistency can be expressed in complete terms, neither external correspondence nor construction can be. Without such instruments to extend our perception, memory, and calculability, we lack the ability of sufficient introspection, and the ability of sufficient external perception, to perceive the internal and external world, at the SCALE of those action that we require for cooperating in large numbers, in a vast division of knowledge and labor – the sum of which constantly reduces the cost in calories and time of the production of goods and services which serve our reproductive interests and perpetuation as a species. This is why ratio-scientific societies outperform magian and allegorical societies: because the constancy of their efforts in correspondence with physical and social reality allows them to take better advantage of physical reality and to cooperate at scale for the production of goods and services. So, since the above statements effectively reflect the scientific method, then the scientific method is not constrained to ‘science’ per say, but it is the only method by which we can improve our actions. ergo: the scientific method is ‘the method’ of philosophy. Now, this does not mean that allegorical language (mysticism, religion, mythology, the narrative) have no pedagogical value. They do because we cannot teach the young any other way. It does not mean that Obscurant language (deception) such as is used by the continentals as a means of maintaining loading and framing, and therefore simply preserving christianity and authoritarianism in new form, is impossible or will not succeed in achieving those desires. It does mean that achieving those desires through obscurantism, deception, framing other than by means of correspondence, will produce negative economic, social and political consequences, because of their failure to correspond to reality. -Curt
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Metaphysics vs Science
(worth reading) –“Curt, loved your brief defense of praxeology earlier on (below). This is off subject but like Katherine, I too am curious in what way metaphysics failed and science is now close to triumph. An example or two please? We can go off line if you like.”– Pat Pat, This is the largest and most controversial topic in philosophy. And I find that I lose pretty much everyone when I try to address it. So I don’t think I can do it in a couple of examples. I can given an analogy between the problems of constructive/intuitional mathematics, the requirements for scientific argument (which are moral constraints actually), the problem of inconstant relations in economics, and the difference between truth and proof. And that forms a basic language for discussion. Since that conversation requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of multiple disciplines It seems that the argument is quite hard to make even if done in long form. BUT TRYING ANYWAY The best I can do is state that imagination can only be tested by action – external correspondence. And our understanding of of our actions tested by internal consistency. And the veracity of our internal consistency by our understanding of construction. As such, our logical methods allow us to construct instruments which assist us in testing correspondence, internal consistency, and construction. Albeit, while internal consistency can be expressed in complete terms, neither external correspondence nor construction can be. Without such instruments to extend our perception, memory, and calculability, we lack the ability of sufficient introspection, and the ability of sufficient external perception, to perceive the internal and external world, at the SCALE of those action that we require for cooperating in large numbers, in a vast division of knowledge and labor – the sum of which constantly reduces the cost in calories and time of the production of goods and services which serve our reproductive interests and perpetuation as a species. This is why ratio-scientific societies outperform magian and allegorical societies: because the constancy of their efforts in correspondence with physical and social reality allows them to take better advantage of physical reality and to cooperate at scale for the production of goods and services. So, since the above statements effectively reflect the scientific method, then the scientific method is not constrained to ‘science’ per say, but it is the only method by which we can improve our actions. ergo: the scientific method is ‘the method’ of philosophy. Now, this does not mean that allegorical language (mysticism, religion, mythology, the narrative) have no pedagogical value. They do because we cannot teach the young any other way. It does not mean that Obscurant language (deception) such as is used by the continentals as a means of maintaining loading and framing, and therefore simply preserving christianity and authoritarianism in new form, is impossible or will not succeed in achieving those desires. It does mean that achieving those desires through obscurantism, deception, framing other than by means of correspondence, will produce negative economic, social and political consequences, because of their failure to correspond to reality. -Curt