Curt Doolittle

Theme: Decidability

  • FAILURE TO USE OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS IN ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND LAW IS CRIMINA

    FAILURE TO USE OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS IN ECONOMICS, POLITICS AND LAW IS CRIMINAL.

    (Profound)(reposted)(worth repeating)

    While a failure to rely upon operational definitions in mathematics, logic and philosophy may only be immoral, and in science unethical – in economics, politics and law it is criminal.

    In Mathematics avoiding operationalism merely perpetuates an error; in logic and philosophy it is deceptive of both others and one’s self; in science wastes others’ time. But in economics, politics and law, failure to use operationalism creates theft.

    That is the answer to the riddle Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe couldn’t solve in economics and ethics. Nor Hayek and Popper and their followers in politics and philosophy. But then, neither did Bridgman and his followers in science, nor Brouwer and his followers in math. I don’t think the long list ending with Kripke solved it either in logic.

    One cannot use this heavily loaded term ‘true’ as other than analogy without a constructive knowledge of its meaning. And the only meaning that is constructively possible is testimony: performative truth. All else is merely proof. And the quaint linguistic contrivance that conflates the most parsimonious possible theory with testimony is, much like multitudinous abuses of the verb to-be, nothing more than a means by which we obscure our ignorance as a means of making mere analogies as a substitute for truth claims. Only constructive proofs demonstrate that one possesses the knowledge to make a truth claim. Everything else is merely analogy.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-04 16:33:00 UTC

  • (Profound) While a failure to rely upon operational definitions in mathematics,

    (Profound)

    While a failure to rely upon operational definitions in mathematics, logic and philosophy may only be immoral, and in science unethical – in economics, politics and law it is criminal.

    In Mathematics avoiding operationalism merely perpetuates an error; in logic and philosophy it is deceptive of both others and one’s self; in science wastes others’ time. But in economics, politics and law, failure to use operationalism creates theft.

    That is the answer to the riddle Mises, Rothbard, and Hoppe couldn’t solve in economics and ethics. Nor Hayek and Popper and their followers in politics and philosophy. But then, neither did Bridgman and his followers in science, nor Brouwer and his followers in math. I don’t think the long list ending with Kripke solved it either in logic.

    One cannot use this heavily loaded term ‘true’ as other than analogy without a constructive knowledge of its meaning. And the only meaning that is constructively possible is testimony: performative truth. All else is merely proof. And the quaint linguistic contrivance that conflates the most parsimonious possible theory with testimony is, much like multitudinous abuses of the verb to-be, nothing more than a means by which we obscure our ignorance as a means of making mere analogies as a substitute for truth claims. Only constructive proofs demonstrate that one possesses the knowledge to make a truth claim. Everything else is merely analogy.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-01 13:21:00 UTC

  • VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE AS DECIDABILITY (worth repeating) —“Austrian principles are

    VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE AS DECIDABILITY

    (worth repeating)

    —“Austrian principles are intuitively constructionist (consisting of a sequence of human actions). And the ethics of voluntary transfer (the requirement that transfers consist of voluntary exchanges) are an operationalist’s method of testing each original/primitive/minimum activity (exchange) as ‘computable’ (decidable).”—

    I think that may be one of the most important paragraphs that I’ve written of late.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-19 04:51:00 UTC

  • THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY It turns out that I’m not alone in

    THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE ON PHILOSOPHY

    It turns out that I’m not alone in this thought: computer science, which is operational (algorithmic) and constructivist(computable), has been replacing and will replace mathematics as the primary method of argument, and classical mathematics as well as Cantorian sets, will remain ‘verbal toolkits’ for the purpose of approximation (lower precision) which allow human minds to think in approximations (deductions) which can later be operationalized. That approach is what intuitionist mathematics recommends for example: discover necessary axioms then prove them.

    Does the operational constraint (algorithmic and computable) in computer science explain why philosophical thought leadership at least on the right and libertarian spectra is coming out of the computer science wing? Is that why austrian economics makes such sense to computer scientists? Or is it merely the skew in IQ distributions as talent follows money, leading to the saturation of technology with smart folk? Or is it a combination of both?

    Programming is pretty much like logic: an art of clear communication that can be conducted many ways. But databases are a bit more like philosophy of science: they must be constructed to correspond with reality. And both programming and databases force you to account for whether information is present for the purpose of making a choice – which is the problem of decidability (sufficiency of information presence) in all fields. Decidability is a serious problem as we create general rules with lower information density. We desperately want to create general rules in which the information is present for deduction. Because this limits the effort of cognition to something we can manage with our feeble minds.

    I learned physics first, computer science second, austrian economics third, and contemporary keynesian economics last. Austrian principles are intuitively constructionist (consisting of a sequence of human actions). And the ethics of voluntary transfer (the requirement that transfers are constructed of voluntary exchanges) are an operationalist’s method of testing each original/primitive/minimum activity (exchange) as ‘computable’ (decidable).

    I suppose that I have the luxury of a century of computing that Mises didn’t have, and the luxury of cognitive science and experimental psychology that Rothbard and Hoppe didn’t have. And I suppose as an operationalist (scientist) I have a higher demand for truth than did Mises, Rothbard or Hoppe. And as a software developer, I have learned that the human mind is an undisciplined creature and it is very difficult to demonstrate that we know what we claim to when we are forced to. Writing advanced software is terribly humbling. Engineering is terribly humbling. If only economics and law were as humbling as software and engineering. But teachers, lawyers and economists (at least those who recommend policy) are insulated from the failure of their models. Whereas in computer science and engineering, large sums of money can be lost, business opportunities lost, and people can die, and there is no one else to blame.

    So I don’t know if what I’ve done is all that smart – we stand on the shoulders of giants – but it was pretty hard to get to this point: where all of philosophy, all of the logics, and all fields, are reducible to a single problem of constructing theories (general rules) consisting of arbitrary precision of some sort or other (including or excluding properties of reality), while preserving the sufficiency of information for use in deduction (the confidence that our general rules allow us to conduct comparisons).

    In any event, it appears that far from being merely engineering, that the practice of software development, particularly in those cases where we deal with human machine interactions, is not subordinate to mathematics precisely because (now that over the past decade we have produced algorithmic equivalents) it is operational and therefore provable.

    And those of us working in ethics, myself in particular, can make use of this insight: that you cannot make a truth claim unless you can operationally construct the argument.

    That austrian economics is ‘correct’ in that it’s operationally moral.

    That praxeology failed because it is a fallacy as mises and rothbard defined it in pseudoscientific and false philosophical terms. Even if we give Kantian arguments some childish validity, we can say that they are useful only by analogy, not by construction and operation.

    Whereas, we can provide a superior explanation of economics, of the logic of cooperation, of the logic of human choice, and the necessity of human acquisition, by the simple acknowledgment of the necessit of property for incentives and economic calculation, the necessary morality of voluntary transfer and exchange, and the empirical analysis of emergent economic phenomenon, from which, like intuitionist mathematics, we explain as rational human actions.

    Curt Doolittle

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-16 06:25:00 UTC

  • EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH —“Truth is replaced by

    EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH

    —“Truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and

    Existence requires constructibility.”—

    It’s interesting (telling?) that Bridgman did his work on Operationalism (in psychology, where I first came across it, it’s “Operationism”), because he understood that the only reason that Physics had not discovered Einstein’s relativity earlier, and the profession had spent years on fallacies, was because they didn’t practice operationalism: articulating (constructions) of all their ideas so that when they extended an abstract idea, they revisited all its underlying assumptions.

    Now, Operationalism is practiced in Psychology as a matter of course, and in as much of physical science as is possible without unnecessary constraint. But the problem remains extant in most disciplines where it has been addressed somehow or other by the mathematicians including Brouwer on in Intuitionist Mathematics, and from Poincare on in Constructivist Mathematics, and the logicians through Kripke and Goedel, and much less intelligently, Mises in Economics, and with less success in law, from the antebellum period through the present on Textualism, Originalism, and Strict Constructionism. And the concept is completely missing from ethics.

    Which is strange because **operationalism is an ethical not logical constraint** on our thinking. We cannot make honest truth claims without it, but that does not constrain us from making approximate deductions – explorations. Exploration is approximate by definition.

    So, I am once again at the realization that the failure of the greeks to solve the problem of free riding, property rights and voluntary exchange, and therefore ethics is the cause of so much of our intellectual failure over the centuries. The answer was sort of sitting there in law but no one seems to have really done much with it.

    And so uniting all the logics and all the branches of philosophy into a single contiguous, consistent system has been impossible. But it’s not impossible..

    It was just sitting there. I dunno. At this point it looks obvious. But that’s because I ran into the ‘economic calculation’ argument, and property rights. And when I did, everything else slowly fell into place. Because they are necessary rather than preferential statements. I think they may be the most important insight into logic that has ever occurred.

    I just don’t understand why it took us so long. Maybe we had to cook individualism sufficiently? I don’t know yet. That seems like the answer.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-15 14:45:00 UTC

  • (joy of philosophy) The problem of arbitrary precision never occurs in voluntary

    (joy of philosophy)

    The problem of arbitrary precision never occurs in voluntary exchange.

    Information is alway sufficient for decidability.

    Buridan’s Ass never starves.

    This is one of those things: once you get it, it’s like relativity was for physicists – the world is a much simpler, and very different place.

    Operationalism solves the problem of reducing all statements to empirical (observable) and therefore sympathetically testable terms.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-14 10:31:00 UTC

  • The Irony Of Praxeological Apriorism

    [I]n retrospect, isn’t it ironic that not just a single thinker, but a group of thinkers have tried to construct a logic of rational action, and extend it into a logic of cooperation, and further into a logic of economics, by using a method of philosophical argument that is expressly not constructed of actions – operations? It is ironic. Its Ironic as hell. But when the irony ends we are left with a tragedy. We lost a century. And we may have lost a century of our liberty because of it.

  • WORTH REPEATING : ARBITRARY PRECISION AND INFORMATION LOSS In mathematics, (intu

    WORTH REPEATING : ARBITRARY PRECISION AND INFORMATION LOSS

    In mathematics, (intuitionist mathematics), the requirement that we demonstrate all operations eliminates the possibility of the excluded middle – which is an unnecessary constraint upon mathematics. (This constraint is equivalent somewhat to computability in computer science.)

    However, in order to create mathematical statements in the form of general rules independent of scale, we divorce the statements from scale, maintaining only the relations themselves (ratios).

    By doing so – loss of context – we lose the information necessary to determine contextual precision. In other words, we no longer know that 1/64 of an inch is the maximum precision necessary for the given calculation. But in any application of the general statement to a given context we then regain the information necessary to make decisions.

    As such general mathematical statements are constructed with arbitrary precision that requires choice independent of context, or contextual application to supply the missing information.

    This problem of creating general statements independent of context is why it was necessary to transition number theory from geometry (infinite precision) to sets (binary precision). Thus reducing all mathematics to truth tables. And binary precision (set membership) is the reason why binary mathematics is so crucial to computation: we are always in a true or false state: a truth table that is universally decidable regardless of contextual precision.

    These discussions evolved in math as a war against mathematical platonism. And by applying the same principle to ethics the problem changes significantly since we never encounter the problem of arbitrary precision.

    In ethics, we do not have the luxury that physics does, in that information cannot be lost and all relations are constant. We are stuck with bounded but relatively inconstant relations.

    But we always can test the rationality of any economic statement that is reduced to a sequence of actions. ***And so we never encounter the problem of arbitrary scale and the insufficiency of information.***

    So when I speak of empiricism ( observation), operationalism (actions in time), and instrumentalism (reducing the imperceptible to the perceptible) it is in the context of ethics not mathematics and as such is not subject to the failure if operationalism and intuitionism to satisfy the needs of mathematicians.

    This is a revolutionary idea.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-12 02:55:00 UTC

  • We Require Exchange and 'Calculability', Not Yet Another Arbitrary Moral Argument

    Regarding: New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State johnmccaskey.com John. [G]ood piece. Although, I’m critical of philosophical pretense in social justice as much as I am in the market. If any judgment is beyond our perception, and any concept of social justice is, then we must, as in all other matters where complexity exceeds our perception, develop some kind of instrumentation and means of calculation such that we can reduce that which we cannot perceive, to some analogy to experience that we can perceive. Moral rules are not sufficient for achieving that kind of instrumentation, or performing that kind of calculation. The problems (of instrumentation and calculation) require formal institutions as a means of calculation. For example, we have the market for cooperating on means even if we disagree on ends. We have the government for forcing cooperation on means and ends by majority rule. We have accounting to assist us in the perception of that which we cannot possibly grasp without it. And we have economics to attempt to measure our success. But we have no such instrumentation and means of calculating “social justice” – or even defining such a thing as social justice. (Which current psychologists and economists suspect is reducible to status seeking, and insurance against risk, and nothing more.) Hayek addresses this thoroughly in TCoL. While we might continue to try to rely upon the methods of the past (philosophy), and attempt to concoct yet another empty incalculable moralism for the purported common good, these results are value judgements and nothing more. They are incalculable. Non Empirical. Unascertainable. [M]ost of the post-enlightenment philosophical effort has considered society a monopoly, in contrast to the pre-enlightenment condition of most urban cities, as federations of minorities denied access to political power, and forced to compete outside of politics, in the market. So the idea of social justice is an artifact of monopoly democracy rather than a federation of disparate interests. This is a fallacy. We have no common goals, only common means of cooperating to achieve disparate goals. However, libertarians rightly argue that the only moral test is that of voluntary exchange free of violent coercion. I argue that this ‘test’ is incorrect, since no in-group human organizations demonstrate that low a level of trust, And instead all groups demonstrate and require higher standards of trust, tah also forbid free riding, deception, cheating, as well as burdening other group members indirectly. However, whether we accept a low trust society and high demand for external authority that low trust societies demonstrate, or a high trust society and the low demand for external authority that high trust societies demonstrate, the underlying argument that the only test of moral action is voluntary exchange. So the effort that political philosophers left, libertarian and right have expended under the universalist assumption of the enlightenment has been to find some justification for moral decision making even if the knowledge to make such decisions is impossible both in the market, and afterward, using the profits created from the market. The question instead, is how to construct institutions with which groups can conduct voluntary exchanges, which are by definition moral. Majority rule does not allow this. Majority rule is sufficient for the selection of priorities in homogenous polities with homogenous interests. The market is the means by which heterogeneous polities cooperate on means despite different interests on ends. But how can we construct an institutional system that allows the construction of commons, and other exchanges between groups and classes, but is not dependent upon a monopoly bureaucracy, majority rule, or representatives open to influence, special interest, and corruption? Because a government of contracts, not laws, would allow the exchange of say, adherence to traditions and norms, or requirements for married families in order to obtain redistribution. This would make government a means of cooperation rather than the source and facilitator of conflict. Cheers Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev

  • We Require Exchange and ‘Calculability’, Not Yet Another Arbitrary Moral Argument

    Regarding: New Libertarians: New Promoters of a Welfare State johnmccaskey.com John. [G]ood piece. Although, I’m critical of philosophical pretense in social justice as much as I am in the market. If any judgment is beyond our perception, and any concept of social justice is, then we must, as in all other matters where complexity exceeds our perception, develop some kind of instrumentation and means of calculation such that we can reduce that which we cannot perceive, to some analogy to experience that we can perceive. Moral rules are not sufficient for achieving that kind of instrumentation, or performing that kind of calculation. The problems (of instrumentation and calculation) require formal institutions as a means of calculation. For example, we have the market for cooperating on means even if we disagree on ends. We have the government for forcing cooperation on means and ends by majority rule. We have accounting to assist us in the perception of that which we cannot possibly grasp without it. And we have economics to attempt to measure our success. But we have no such instrumentation and means of calculating “social justice” – or even defining such a thing as social justice. (Which current psychologists and economists suspect is reducible to status seeking, and insurance against risk, and nothing more.) Hayek addresses this thoroughly in TCoL. While we might continue to try to rely upon the methods of the past (philosophy), and attempt to concoct yet another empty incalculable moralism for the purported common good, these results are value judgements and nothing more. They are incalculable. Non Empirical. Unascertainable. [M]ost of the post-enlightenment philosophical effort has considered society a monopoly, in contrast to the pre-enlightenment condition of most urban cities, as federations of minorities denied access to political power, and forced to compete outside of politics, in the market. So the idea of social justice is an artifact of monopoly democracy rather than a federation of disparate interests. This is a fallacy. We have no common goals, only common means of cooperating to achieve disparate goals. However, libertarians rightly argue that the only moral test is that of voluntary exchange free of violent coercion. I argue that this ‘test’ is incorrect, since no in-group human organizations demonstrate that low a level of trust, And instead all groups demonstrate and require higher standards of trust, tah also forbid free riding, deception, cheating, as well as burdening other group members indirectly. However, whether we accept a low trust society and high demand for external authority that low trust societies demonstrate, or a high trust society and the low demand for external authority that high trust societies demonstrate, the underlying argument that the only test of moral action is voluntary exchange. So the effort that political philosophers left, libertarian and right have expended under the universalist assumption of the enlightenment has been to find some justification for moral decision making even if the knowledge to make such decisions is impossible both in the market, and afterward, using the profits created from the market. The question instead, is how to construct institutions with which groups can conduct voluntary exchanges, which are by definition moral. Majority rule does not allow this. Majority rule is sufficient for the selection of priorities in homogenous polities with homogenous interests. The market is the means by which heterogeneous polities cooperate on means despite different interests on ends. But how can we construct an institutional system that allows the construction of commons, and other exchanges between groups and classes, but is not dependent upon a monopoly bureaucracy, majority rule, or representatives open to influence, special interest, and corruption? Because a government of contracts, not laws, would allow the exchange of say, adherence to traditions and norms, or requirements for married families in order to obtain redistribution. This would make government a means of cooperation rather than the source and facilitator of conflict. Cheers Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev