Theme: Science

THE PATTERN OF HUMAN ERROR IN PSEUDOSCIENCE

(from elsewhere)

Mark,

There is a pattern to human error.

There is a particular pattern to 20th c. error, if not to enlightenment error, and certainly to French->Cosmopolitan error.

One does not need to necessarily know the answer to a scientific question as much as know the categories of error that humans make in pursuing answers to questions. In other words, when confronted with a complex problem, it is just as valuable to look at cognitive, personal, social, cultural, and methodological biases as it is to explore the question. (Einstein’s late discovery is an example of our assumption of the nature of such a basic concept as length.)

Anti-spanking, like anti-fist-fighting, like anti-duelling, like anti-hanging (death penalty), like anti-war sentiments fall into a category of common human errors. Just like democracy, universalism, scale, peace, and predictability fall into that same category of human error.

Maximizing the pleasure or comfort of individual life on a society-wide scale is the result of conspicuous consumption in an era of windfall-wealth.

A simple person can isolate a particular cause effect relationship but this fails to make take full accounting of the consequences of ‘the peace’: fragility, vulnerability, overextension, risk expansion.

How do you know that the luxury good of not-doing X (in this case spanking) is in fact a good, rather than an example of hyperconsumption that causes externalities that are the opposite of what one predicts?

And is not the Period of the 19th and 20th century science not one of a series of optimistic predictions the culmination of which are rather obvious bads?

Keynesian economics appears to be a good. Democracy appears to be good. Universal enfranchisement seems to be a good. No fault divorce seemed to be a good. Social security seems to be a good. Welfare seems to be a good.

We have attempted to create many goods that are dependent upon what we call ‘science’. But the experiment that we have been conducting since the enlightenment seems entirely predicated upon the physical sciences – and almost everything we have attempted in the social sciences that was the product of the Cosmopolitan enlightenment (Boaz, Marx, Freud, Adorno-et-al) appears to be false. If for no other reason than the time scale of our measurements.

In other words, our SENSES and our REASONING from our senses appears to be just as erroneous in social science as it was in physical science prior to empiricism. And we solved much more of physical science precisely because it’s more simple than social science given the rate at which changes are reflected in the universe.

We have mostly overthrown all Boaz, Marx-Keynes, Freud by the replacement of their disciplines with anthropology, genetics, and cognitive science. Our libertarian and conservative movements are attempting to overthrow Adorno-et-al. But the reason that we are the victims of pseudoscience in anthropology, politics, sociology, psychology, economics, and to a lesser degree in physics, came out of the enlightenment – an era in which each society (british, american, german, french, jewish/cosmopolitan, and russian) attempted to state their LOCAL group evolutionary strategy as a universal moral good, as a justification for overthrowing the church-monarchy balance of powers with a political monopoly we call ‘democracy’.

Now, I work on this problem, so does Taleb – albeit we work from different perspectives – but any number of historians work on it (Ferguson, Acemoglu, Emmanuel Todd et all.) And we are all engaged in attempting to correct these erroneous presumptions that have caused the accumulated damage to western civilization despite the vast returns on (largely 19th c.) science.

And it’s very easy, from the perspective of “humans are making these kinds of errors all over the place for these historical reasons”, simply because of the insufficiency of what we call the scientific method, to identify areas of high probably of error by the kind of arguments made and the means of decidability those arguments depend upon.

And spanking, like all anti-violence, anti-stress, hyperconsumptive arguments fall into that category.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine