Theme: Science

MERGING TALEB AND DOOLITTLE : WE SOLVED THE PROBLEM THE PREVIOUS GENERATIONS DIDN’T

Nassim Taleb is doing an amazing job narrowing in on the various means by which pseudoscientific frauds are conducted in the 20th and 21st centuries.

His writing as a philosopher is another example we can use to illustrate that all of us speak in the languages of our cultures – our enlightenments – and we cannot escape them. Nassim speaks in an interesting combination of Mediterranean loading, continental framing and the empirical and mathematical, but never quite ventures into the analytic and legal. As an American, of course I do the opposite, I speak in the analytic and legal without loading or framing, and I avoid the mathematical whenever possible except to explain philosophical concepts in the clearest possible terms

Taleb makes multiple true statements, and some that he just hasn’t quite taken far enough yet:

ORGANIZATIONAL ANTI-FRAGILITY

1 – Organisms and Organizations consist of various biological networks that gain greater survival potential when resources are regularly devoted to growing adaptations against multiple conditions rather than overloading(exhausting) adaptation to any individual condition. (Unlike static systems). (Efficiency is a chimera.)

JUSTIFICATIONISM

2 – Measurement of probability (justificationism) is pseudoscientific, whereas measurement of fragility (criticism) is scientific. And our sciences are heavily infected with measurements of probabilistic mathematical justifications that export risk onto others, and they do not consist of measurements of operational criticisms fully accounting for export of risk onto others.

In other words, the justificationary demon is not yet purged from what we call the sciences.

NOTE: I don’t think he makes the (obvious) point that between Hayek(anti-fragile/shocks) and Keynes(fragile/probabilities), that ‘we are all Keynesians now’ because of the failure of Poincare, mises, Brouwer, Bridgman, and Popper, and now Mandelbrot, from solving Taleb’s observation and my solution.

OPTIONS

3 – He correctly identifies that we operate by consistent option-seizure, and that we justify it post hoc with explanations and plans. He does not take this to the next conclusion that all epistemology works by free association (searching for matches), hypothesis (survival from wayfinding), theory(survival from personal criticism), law (survival from market for criticism). That different logical claims (apriorism, deducibility, probability, induction, and abduction are just special cases in this process – just as prime numbers are special cases of natural numbers). And that human beings evolve in moral conditions where they justified their actions. We evolved in conditions where we explained causal relations to others in ordinary language. We evolved in conditions where repetition of past successes saved us energy. So we evolved with justificationary (cheap) means of calculating, while modernity we live in a more causally dense world, consisting largely of phenomenon beyond your abilty to sense, perceive, cognate, and act, and that to understand such phenomenon beyond human scale, and beyond human limits, that we must spend the majority of our efforts eliminating error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, loading, framing, overloading, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience, and outright deceit. In other words, we must transition from our innate dependence upon justificaitionism at human scale, to criticism at beyond human scale.

SKIN(pre/voluntary) VS WARRANTY(post/involuntary)

Taleb’s Skin in the Game (investor-speak) and my Warranty of Due diligence (Legal Speak) are relatively identical propositions. However, my solution is institutionally sufficient (informational commons, testimonialism, universal standing) to correct this defect.

OPERATIONAL SOLVES INDESCRIBABLE

Nassim isn’t quite right in his criticism of the scientific, versus the intuitionistic, or what he calls the limits of language. This is simply false as I think I’ve pretty thoroughly demonstrated elsewhere. It’s just that he wasn’t able to solve the problem of expressing human acquisition, property in toto, moral intuitions, operational (scientific) language, so that the experiential is described as ‘when I do this’ rather than ‘the feeling of this’.

He doesn’t make the connection that the limits of human perception, cognition, speech, and action, are themselves units of measure, and that cooperation (with warranty), is the only equals sign in the equation. He comes very, very, very close.

Why? Well, he started out with programming/modeling(operations), math(measurement) and finance(gains and losses) and writes in essays, and I started out with Programming, Rule of Law, Micro Economics, and the Philosophy of Science, and as such I basically write in operational ‘proofs’ that people WISH were essays.

SOLUTION

So we fix the problem of pseudoscientific interpersonal frauds (unethical pseudosciences) and pseudoscientific public(commons) frauds: privatization of commons / socialization of losses (immoral pseudosciences), by the extension of the forcible warranty that we apply to goods and services, to public speech.

And no, that is not difficult. Which is what Taleb is saying as a general ambition and I am saying as a specific solution.

What due diligences must exist in public speech that are testable in a court before a jury of peers?

1) Identity: Categorical Consistency

2) Logical: Internal Consistency

3) Empirical: External Consistency

4) Operational: Existential Consistency (Operational Language)

5) Moral: Moral Consistency (Productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers, limited to externalities of the same criteria)

6) Scope: Full Accounting, Limits, Parsimony.

The first three (identity, logical, empirical) are things we already know how to test thoroughly. Our law does test moral (by natural law) but not sufficiently in scope (property in toto), and conflates natural law (natural, common, judge discovered law) with legislation and regulation, and all too often opinion.

The fourth, Operationalism, is already practiced in the hard sciences and is slowly being adopted elsewhere. But think of it this way: if we can discover an empirical pattern, yet we cannot explain it as a series of rational human actions, then we do not know about what we speak, because we have not demonstrated that such actions by participants are both possible and moral(objectively legal). This issue remains the great failure of the twentieth-century philosophers. Because while understood in physics and math where it matters only a little, in the social and psychological domains(economics, politics, law, sociology, psychology), where humans perceive and act, it is extremely important. And what appears to have occurred in retrospect, is that the purchasing power of financial fraud throughout the world was of greater utility than the defense against the consequential fragility provided by a requirement that we protect the information quality, sovereign choice, and various forms of capital in our civilizations. (How do you price the frauds of the 20th century?)

Where I’ve tried to add clarity is in how we can test for fraud, and prosecute it, and where Nassim has tried to add clarity is in demonstrating how fraud is conducted, and how we can reform the pseudosciences by transferring from justificationary to critical methods of measures.

So most of that added clarity comes in Full Accounting. That is, that if we take all forms of possible capital (assets) available to man, then we must demonstrate what occurs as a consequence of any prescribed action (or fraud) both good and bad. In this way we show that most ‘sales’ are safe bets with little or no return, but big risks, and the salesman’s (politician’s) commission is taken either way.

If I take Nassim’s tests of pseudoscience and add them to the tests of full accounting, that means we have a sufficiently complete system for the enactment of law that prohibits fraud by pseudoscientific and pseudorational means.

And it’s a failure to fully account for consequences both good and bad that has allowed the pervasive expansion of the pseudosciences in the twentieth century, of which Nassim only touches lightly:

Boazian Pseudoscientific Anthropology, Marxist Social Science, Socialism and Keynesian Pseudoscientific Probabilism, Cantorian Restoration of Mathematical Platonism, Freudian Pseudoscientific Psychology, and Adorno/Frankfurt Pseudoscientific Aesthetics, and the many thousands of consequences that have occurred from the use and abuse of innumeracy, rationalism, and pseudoscience to overwhelm the human ability to reason, therefore demanding we rely on intuition, which is, unfortunately, extremely fragile in those matters beyond human scale.

MY CRITICISM IS MORE HARSH AND BROADER THAN TALEB’S

I view the 20th century as did Hayek as the second attempt to conquer western civilization. This time, not using Oriental Mysticism and scriptural religion that has plagued the world with ignorance for over two thousand years. But using pseudoscience, pseudorationalism, innumeracy, loading, framing, and overloading made possible by governments at large scale using various forms of data collection and record keeping, and using various forms of new media which by repetition and consumer incentive, has created the second great fragility for civilization.

THE WEST EVOLVED FASTER FOR INSTITUTIONAL REASONS BOTH INFORMAL AND FORMAL

The reason the west evolved faster than the rest in the ancient and modern worlds, is our reliance on Sovereignty and Heroism, which as a consequence required we solve all matters of decision making not through authority but through markets and productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchanges, that do not provoke retaliations regardless of success or failure:

A market for dispute resolution: natural, empirical, discovered law, independent judiciary, and jury of peers.

A market for the production of commons: houses for each classes in which trades could be conducted for the development and provision of commons.

A market for enfranchisement: public service in exchange for the franchise.

A market for leadership: the judge of last resort: monarchy.

A market for reproduction: voluntary marriage and family.

A market for access to productivity: manorialism required married couples and a person of character.

A demand for martial (empirical) truth (testimony) in the face of harsh punishment. (American courts still punish falsehood in court more harshly than the original crime).

Markets calculate faster, common law adapts faster, high trust because of truth telling and strong courts encourage risk. Anglo post-hoc law (common law) adapts faster than continental propter-hoc (heavily regulated) law.

WE ARE DONE SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. THE PROBLEM NOW, IS THAT IMPOSING THE CURE TO PSEUDOSCIENCE BY TRUTHFUL SPEECH WILL BE AS GREAT AS THE ENLIGHTENMENT CONQUEST OF MYSTICISM BY EMPIRICISM.

But I bet you didn’t realize that we were saving western civilization by doing it. And maybe the entire world from another dark age.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine