Theme: Science

  • DEFINING CONSERVATISM IN SCIENTIFIC TERMS Conservatism Understood 1. A conservat

    DEFINING CONSERVATISM IN SCIENTIFIC TERMS

    Conservatism Understood

    1. A conservative questions the overestimation of reason, and above all questions consensus. Conservatism is familial, stoic, pragmatic, and empirical. In other words risk averse to capital.

    2. As a means of questioning, a conservative requires reciprocity (tort): american < british < anglo saxon < germanic < european < norther indo european in law. That law evolved from the oath (tell the truth, never steal, never flee, in combat).

    3. A Conservative requires ‘empirical’ results – and where empirical fails, the ‘traditional’ is adequate, since traditional survived empirical tests in competition in reality.

    4. A Conservative accumulates genetic, cultural, normative, institutional, physical, and territorial capital – attempting to pass on to future generations of his family, more than he himself inherited.

    5. Conservatism is a eugenic group evolutionary strategy that increases accumulated capital through intergenerational transfer, using intergeneration lending, in order to produce increasingly ‘noble’ families.

    6. Ergo successful individuals in the market for craftsmanship, successful purchase of the franchise through military service, successful individuals in the market for marriage and child rearing, successful individuals in the market for industry, successful families in the market for noble (intergenerational) families.

    7. In other words, conservatism(aristocracy) is a eugenic group evolutionary strategy. And while bipartite manorialism was practiced from 700, and aggressive hanging of up to 1% of the population every year after 1000, and an attempt to escape church-state nobility, and create an entrepreneurial nobility (meritocracy), succeeded by 1600, there was a great reaction to the english revolution, and a greater reaction to the french revolution. Thus while Locke,smith,hume,adams, and jefferson promised an aristocracy available to everyone, Burke, after the french revolution, and germans after that, recognized that the peasantry was even worse at rule (see russia) than the nobility.

    The problem with today’s conservatism is that darwin and spencer were famous before the war, after the second world war, conservatism and eugenics were effectively banned from discourse, academy, and science.

    As such conservatives never (until perhaps 2000) restored empirical discourse to conservatism, because eugenics are antithetical to the experiment with democracy. This changed incrementally beginning in 76, through the 80s, and aggressively since 2000, and more aggressively since 2008.

    1 – Soveriengty requires reciprocity

    2 – Reciprocity requires rule of law (tort), jury(thang, senate, house of lords, supreme court), and an independent judiciary.

    3 – Rule of law forces markets, since it incrementally suppresses each innovation in parasitism.

    4 – Markets cause hierarchies, because they are necessary to voluntarily organize production.

    5 – Markets are eugenic, because they are empirical means of testing industry and impulse.

    6 – But they make possible liberty for those with property, freedom for those who labor, and subsidy for those who impose no costs on sovereignty, liberty, freedom, or property.**

    DOMESTICATION
    Man domesticated the human animal after he had learned to domesticate the non-human animal. And he did so by the same means. And the result in both domestication of the human and non human animal is the same: eugenics.

    CONSERVATIVES
    Most conservatives do not write philosophy, they run businesses, or write history, economics, science, and law. (I write because I was successful enough in multiple businesses to spend my time writing full time.) Conservatives also are actively suppressed in academy and media.

    This has been true since the end of the war and the rise of the Frankfurt School, and the Postmodern school, both of which were necessary after the failure of marxist pseudoscience. (a pseudoscience marx died knowing, since he stopped writing as soon as he read the Mengerians, and kept silent only to keep the checks coming in from Engels.)

    AUTHORS TO READ
    Burke, Hayek, Burnham, Sowell, Buchanan, Murray, and maybe Nietzsche. Veblen.
    (The essayists are nonsense)
    Anyone in Hoover or Heritage institutions.

    READING LIST
    Our Reading List (https://t.co/Nus5JIA88v).

    My reading list (above) contains most of the science we’ve been looking for, while the pseudosciences dominated the mid to late 20th century under the marxist-postmodernists.

    Cheers


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-30 16:44:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1752372295962689536

  • RT @razibkhan: They’re all Greeks to me (part 1) In 2021, a seminal ancient DNA

    RT @razibkhan: They’re all Greeks to me (part 1) https://www.razibkhan.com/p/theyre-all-greeks-to-me-part-1?r=u0rd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web In 2021, a seminal ancient DNA paper titled The genomic history of…


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-29 04:50:30 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751830153808801864

  • Yes. But the exceptionally important eugenics movement was killed by the nazis a

    Yes. But the exceptionally important eugenics movement was killed by the nazis and the postwar behavior of the jews.


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-29 04:36:42 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751826681109619021

    Reply addressees: @RemttidAcul

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751826473114112032

  • There are many bullshitters among those who claim they are scientists. But that

    There are many bullshitters among those who claim they are scientists. But that is merely because we have failed to apply the same standard to research goods as we have ordinary consumer, business, industrial, and government products, services, and information. This isn’t terribly hard to do.

    It would unemploy vast numbers of pseudoscientists, and sophists, and fictionalists and petty criminals. I can’t think of a better law to enact for researchers academics public intellectuals reporters advertisers and marketers. 😉

    That does not mean science is not the most powerful method of the production of truth we have ever invented and is very likely if not certainly the most advanced it is possible for humans to develop.

    The fact that the nitwit and midwit factions are as easily fooled by nonsense, pseudoscience, sophistry, and theology is a function of the commonality of nitwits and midwits.

    Reply addressees: @Laymandaman @ScottAdamsSays


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-28 19:49:04 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751693895170215936

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751659367454453843

  • Science means the production of testifiable testimony. Science functions by the

    Science means the production of testifiable testimony.
    Science functions by the competition for survival between testifiable testimonies in the market for testifiable testimonies that consists of other scientists.
    Not all scientific publications or claims survive even the initial test of testifiable under the most basic competitive scrutiny.
    Some survive partly for a time. Some survive partly for a long time. But cumulatively over time those some or all of some hypotheses and theories survive replication, application, and survival in both application and competition from new testifiable testimonies whether hypotheses or theories.
    The progress of this competition for survival, over time, increases the unambiguity(identity), parsimony, consistency, correspondence, and causality of the set of surviving testifiable testimonies (claims, first principles, laws).
    At some point maximum reducibility within a domain is discovered, consisting of textual first principles or or mathematical law, resulting in settled science. (chemistry)
    At some point we
    Therefore Science is merely the application of western tradition of court testimony from civil and criminal matters to mere disputes to hypotheses and theories about the universe and all within it.
    This means that Science is an extension of jurisprudence, and progresses as does jurisprudence, and as a consequence of all knowledge, by Darwinian evolutionary process applied to thought using words.
    Science is just testifiable testimony.
    Non-Science is untestifiable.
    ANd to claim the unjustifiable is true is always and everywhere to lie.
    One can claim supernatural faith.
    One can claim reasonable belief
    One can claim habitual trust
    One can claim experiential confidence
    One can claim the certainty exhaustive knowledge and experience.
    But none of those terms are the same as ‘true’.
    Only testimony that is testifiable, because it satisfies the demand for realism, naturalism, identity, consistency, correspondence, constructability, reciprocity, and full accounting within stated limits can be claimed “true”.

    Reply addressees: @Laymandaman @ScottAdamsSays


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-28 19:38:59 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751691358236991488

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751659367454453843

  • (I think I”ll handle the physics questions clearly enough when we publish. It’s

    (I think I”ll handle the physics questions clearly enough when we publish. It’s not really that complicated. I’m sure that when the present generation of failing physicists die off the new generation will try for discrete models of the universe, and the present work on those…


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-28 02:15:22 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751428723864174980

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1751394703260684307

  • RT @curtdoolittle: -“Q: WHAT IS THE INSTITUTE’S AGENDA?”- (Our agenda is to prod

    RT @curtdoolittle: -“Q: WHAT IS THE INSTITUTE’S AGENDA?”-
    (Our agenda is to produce a universally commensurable value-neutral science and…


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-24 19:33:12 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1750240354232623251

  • RT @curtdoolittle: I mean, if you’re male, analytic, over 130, low need for agre

    RT @curtdoolittle: I mean, if you’re male, analytic, over 130, low need for agreeableness, know history, some science, and some econ, and e…


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-24 18:55:18 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1750230816003588301

  • DISAMBIGUATING THE SPECTRUM OF BELIEF: WE HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE SCIENTIFIC METH

    DISAMBIGUATING THE SPECTRUM OF BELIEF: WE HAVE CONFIDENCE IN THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD -NOT FAITH. 😉
    (or Faith != Belief != Confidence)
    (The sufficiency of confidence in one’s mental predictions to warranty taking corresponding actions in the face of cost and risk. Or what in The Work (P-Law) we call the provision of decidability sufficient to satisfy demand for infallibility: Or what we define as the truth spectrum.

    OR: “I love you Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh, but Faith != Belief != Confidence”, and Induction conveys no confidence but is necessary for ideation that may then lead to hypotheses. 😉 So we don’t have faith in the scientific method we have confidence in it. 😉
    RE: https://t.co/3khQyE44np

    Let’s explain:

    REGARDING HUME
    In the sequence Deduction > Induction > Abduction > Guess > Idea via auto-association, each term merely provides us with fewer dimensions of consistency and correspondence for use by our minds (Hippocampal region CA1) to produce suggestions to investigate and determine if these ideas survive falsification.
    In an era of cognitive science we know how the brain performs these functions. In his era, Hume was counseling against an over reliance on reason and especially justification, and in doing so he was demanding that empiricism (due diligence by demonstrated actions) was necessary, rather than induction providing any increase in the likelihood our imaginings are correct. This is effectively what Karl Popper was saying two centuries later, with even greater precision, and concordance with Darwin: Ideas survive they are not proved. Proof is a term from mathematics that refrs to demonstration of internal consistency of a sequence of deductive operations. It is an axiomatic (logical and declarative) not scientific (physical and descriptive) term. In science (the production of testimony) ideas survive or they do not.

    In other words Hume wasn’t claiming that induction was an illusion – he was claiming that it didn’t contribute to predictive likelihood: truth. Yet it did contribute to the process of ideation that could later be subject to sufficient due diligence that it might survive the individual, the market for its application, and the market for competing theories.

    DEFINITION OF “BELIEF”

    1. Cognitive science. In cognitive science, a belief is understood as a mental representation of an attitude positively oriented towards the likelihood of something being true. (Prediction) Beliefs in this context are central to information processing and guide decision-making and problem-solving. They influence how we perceive and interact with the world and can be shaped by both internal cognition and external stimuli.

    2. Psychology views beliefs as mental constructs that represent an individual’s understanding and interpretation of the world. (Predictions) These constructs are not just passive information stores but active elements in shaping thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Beliefs in psychology are often linked with attitudes and values, influencing how individuals react emotionally and behaviorally to various situations.

    3. Behavioral economics defines beliefs as drivers of economic behavior, significantly influencing decision-making processes. Beliefs in this discipline often pertain to an individual’s expectations about outcomes and risks. They play a crucial role in understanding why people make seemingly irrational economic decisions, diverging from the traditional economic assumption of complete rationality.

    BELIEF AS A STANDARD OF WEIGHT AND MEASURE
    We will use the term Belief (Believe) as the general term for

    THE SPECTRUM OF WILLINGNESS TO ACT GIVEN THE DEMAND FOR INFALLIBILITY

    CAUSALITY
    Instinct refers to innate, biologically driven behaviors that are typically hardwired into an organism. In humans, these can be primal responses like fight-or-flight reactions. Cognitive science views instincts as foundational responses that precede conscious reasoning.

    Intuition refers to the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. It’s a step beyond instinct, involving subconscious processing based on past experiences and learned patterns. Intuition acts as a rapid, often affect-laden, assessment of a situation or information.

    AutoAssociation refers to the automatic linking of related concepts or experiences. It’s a subconscious process where exposure to one stimulus triggers the recall of an associated stimulus. This process is crucial in forming preliminary concepts and ideas.

    IDEA
    Idea refers to the transition from subconscious processes to conscious thought. An idea is a cognitive construct that arises from the synthesis of various associations, intuitions, and information. It’s more structured and deliberate compared to instinct and intuition.

    HYPOTHESIS
    *Belief (Self) Acceptance that something exists or is true, especially without necessary and sufficient evidence to claim it is true. Beliefs can be based on faith, cultural teachings, or personal reasoning, or personal convictions.

    Faith (Intuition and others) in the Supernatural (Imaginable Justification). Involves a strong, unwavering conviction in something without requiring empirical evidence such as religious or spiritual beliefs.

    Trust (others) in the Empirical (Observable Evidence). A reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. Trust often develops from personal experience or credible information.

    Assurance (market) – A sense of confidence or certainty in a belief or trust, typically based on experience, repeated evidence, or strong rational reasoning.

    THEORY
    Confidence (adversarial market) in the Scientific (Testifiable Due Diligence). A firm belief in something with a strong basis in evidence or experience.

    Conviction (Survival) – A more intense form of confidence, often accompanied by a personal commitment to the belief or idea.

    Certainty (Exhaustion of the Market for Falsification) – A mental state where one has no doubt about the information or belief, often based on a combination of evidence, experience, and reasoning.

    LAW
    Incontrovertibility – This refers to a state of mind where the belief or knowledge is considered undeniable, often due to overwhelming evidence or logical coherence.

    AXIOMATIC LAW
    Axiomatic Certainty – A belief that is accepted as a fundamental truth, often considered self-evident and used as a foundational principle for further reasoning or belief systems.

    COGNITIVE BIASES INFLUENCE THE TRANSITION FROM CONFIDENCE TO AXIOMATIC BELIEFS:
    Cognitive Biases
    Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. They influence how individuals process information and form beliefs, often leading to errors in reasoning.

    1. Confirmation Bias
    Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs. It plays a crucial role in strengthening conviction as individuals tend to disregard information that contradicts their existing beliefs, leading to a solidification of those beliefs.

    2. Availability Heuristic
    This heuristic involves overestimating the importance of information that is readily available. It can lead to a perception of incontrovertibility, as individuals might give undue weight to recent or memorable events when forming beliefs.

    3. Anchoring Bias
    Anchoring occurs when individuals rely too heavily on an initial piece of information (the “anchor”) when making decisions. This bias can lead to the formation of axiomatic beliefs if the initial information is accepted without critical scrutiny and used as a basis for further reasoning.

    4. Dunning-Kruger Effect
    This cognitive bias refers to a situation where individuals with limited knowledge or competence in a domain overestimate their own abilities. In the context of belief formation, this can lead to unwarranted confidence and a lack of recognition of one’s own limitations in understanding.

    5. Cognitive Dissonance
    Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. This discomfort often leads to an alteration in one of the beliefs or attitudes to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

    Understanding cognitive biases is essential in comprehending how choice evolves and solidifies. Recognizing these biases can help in critically evaluating one’s own intuitions, thoughts, ideas and in making more informed decisions.

    CONCLUSION
    I could, and probably should combine my work on decidability, with my work on the spectrum of truth, with this work on the spectrum of beliefs (hypotheses) in a quaint little table which I assume would be a public service but I have to finish re-reading a hundred page paper in the two hours, compiling notes and feedback so it will have to wait for another day. 😉

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle
    The Natural Law Institute
    The Science of Cooperation


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-24 17:21:02 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1750207091938111488

  • No, the answer is “I don’t know … yet” because we don’ know “yet”. They are no

    No, the answer is “I don’t know … yet” because we don’ know “yet”. They are not leaps of faith unless they are supernatural in origin. Belief in reason. Trust in experience. Confidence in experience and understanding.

    That’s the epistemic curve, and each term is, just like child, young adult, mature adult, experienced adult, skilled adult – an expression of the evolution of the concept of likelihood as man evolved from primitive anthropomorphic suprstition to philosophical reasoning, to empiricism to science … to now, we are at first principles (laws) and a formal operational logic, but we are absent an understanding of gravity that would give us the full model. And that ignorance is due to a persistent and common error among humans which is a misunderstanding of mathmatics vs what it measures and how to conduct inquiry without making the confusion by conflation that so many do.

    Reply addressees: @Gyeff0 @MarlinDBJr


    Source date (UTC): 2024-01-23 15:08:49 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1749811430629769216

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1749807111130030411