Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • Noah, I can throw an wrench in the saltwater either-or comparison and say this:

    Noah,

    I can throw an wrench in the saltwater either-or comparison and say this:

    That if saltwater economists and justify pseudo-scientific morality, then why can’t freshwater economists defend morality with pseudo-scientific models.

    The problem isn’t that one side or the other errs. It’s that both sides err.

    Why do politicians and voters react positively to freshwater arguments, and negatively to saltwater arguments?

    Is it because they are ill informed? Or is because justifying morality poorly is preferable to justifying immorality well.

    And lest you suggest that morals are subjective, one would have to answer why cooperation is preferable to non-cooperation. It is only preferable if it is not parasitic for the individual – not if it is merely Pareto optimal in the aggregate.

    And why is this conflict raging in economics and politics?

    The underlying question is one of familialism, tribalism and dysgenia – is our society moral or not? Is heterogeneity a good or a bad?

    And that is too uncomfortable a question for the Academy to answer.

    Which is why some of us are out here trying to answer it.

    Uncomfortable truth that it is.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-24 12:01:00 UTC

  • (From elsewhere) (scientific method) (rule of law) Peter, Thanks again. (I am ex

    (From elsewhere) (scientific method) (rule of law)

    Peter,

    Thanks again. (I am extremely appreciative of your attention. I wish I could reduce my work to pithy one liners but I can’t.)

    Getting a couple of things out of the way: (a) Yes, My point was Hoppe was just a door for me because his arguments were analytic. Other have argued that it’s all in Kuehnelt-Leddihn – which is purely narrative. (b) I don’t believe Brouwer, Hibert, Goedel, Cantor, Russell, Mises, (or even Keynes – at least in his work on probability) understood that they were all dealing with the problem of justification. It’s clear that Poincaré couldn’t solve it. I am pretty sure that only Popper understood it. And that only Bridgman understood why – but he could not generalize it. Hayek certainly sensed it and reached into every possible discipline but couldn’t solve it except perhaps in law. But all of them sensed that something was not quite right – that science had evolved into pseudoscience: or what we today are calling ‘mathiness’. And what physicists claim is an over reliance on models and an under-reliance on increasingly expensive experimentation.

    (c) As to my reaction to Firestien, my reaction is the same as you suggested above: I go to the original authors: Hume on induction, and Popper on Critical Rationalism (even in its flawed cosmopolitan, rationalist and imprecise form), and Bridgman on his acknowledgement that we should have discovered relativity many generations earlier.

    So, of course I agree with “Ignorance”. But then, lets look at the difference between the goals of the research scientist and a teacher of science and the goals of the author of a constitution and the judges who must interpret the a law under the rule of law, such that he preserves logical decidability and therefore need not add his own subjective content in order to preserve rule of law. In other words: rather than the investigator lets look at the rules of constructing an institution that preserves liberty.

    So we start with: ‘meaning’ which assists in free association (theorizing), and ‘constructions’ which constitute proofs (the act of deciding), are very different things.

    Law must be strictly constructed if it is to be free of subjective content. This is the virtue of property rights as a positive expression of the single requirement for rational cooperation: the requirement that actions that affect others be productive, not parasitic.

    The rule of law should consist in a series of negatives, strictly constructed in response to innovations in parasitism which violate the rational incentive to cooperate.

    I am not concerned with free association – that’s a scientists concern. I do not think there is any magic to the now rather obvious fact that ‘what works’ (recipes) and ‘general rules’ (theories) are two different things – the former lets us act, the latter helps us with freely associating. But the only truths we know – meaning the only informationally complete statements – are negatives: what we know that fails. At this point it’s fairly obvious. (IN fact I have argued that there is only one rather expensive question that we need to answer in the practice of science: whether the least-cost means that we pursue confirms or falsifies Popper’s theory of Critical Preference. (I think there is a good argument to be made that we already perform the optimum means of investigation: cost based.)

    HOW DOES LAW EFFECT THE STUDY OF ECONOMICS?

    If you have immoral laws, and perform economic research to justify them, you then perform immoral economics. This is the essence of the Misesian argument. Mises made the (erroneous) argument that this was a scientific or logical constraint – it is neither. It is merely immoral. Cooperation is either rational or not. If it is not, then it is not cooperation, it is predation. And man has no obligation to suffer predation.

    Likewise praxeology allows us to construct proofs: tests of existential possibility, but not truths. We can theorize either empirically or through construction, or through free association: the means by which we come up with theories is irrelevant. What is relevant is the means by which we perform due diligence. And one of the tests of due diligence is morality: whether the transfers involved are voluntary (rational.)

    So the debate about how we do economics: empirically or deductively or by imagining fairy tail worlds, is totally irrelevant. it’s whether we test out theories. And without operational testing, (a praxeological test) we do not know whether our work is moral or not – or possible or not.

    So the missing logic in the sequence:

    – Identity (category)

    – Name (what we mistakenly call numbering)

    – Addition / Subtraction (arithmetic)

    – Relation (mathematics)

    – Causation (physics)

    was:

    – Cooperation. (economics) Meaning: Property rights as positive expressions of the negative prohibition on parasitism, without which cooperation is irrational; and where fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of externality are a sufficient test of rational and moral action.

    followed by:

    – Decidability (Law). Strict construction.

    So operational criticism is not means of investigation – the means of investigation is irrelevant (that would be the fallacy of justification). Operations are a test of existential possibility. And laws are means of recording truth propositions in the negative form. Liberty is not a positive argument. It is a prohibitionary one: non-parasitism by violence, theft, fraud, indirection, free riding, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, conspiracy, conversion, invasion, conquest, and murder.

    So that is the difference in value judgements: do you wish assistance in free association? Or do you wish assistance in preventing the parasitism that allows for free association?

    That the warranty of due diligence is normatively enforced rather than legally enforced is less important in science than it is in propaganda. Because it is by propaganda and pseudoscience that the postmodern and progressive agenda is advanced.

    The norms of science need be practiced as requirement for warranties of due diligence before information is added to the informational commons – and those violate those warranties should pay restitution for their damages.

    Truth telling can be institutionalized. Because one need not be correct. one need only perform due diligence that he is not engaged in errors of omission, insufficient elimination of imaginary content, bias, and deceit.

    Scientists (even critical rationalists) defend their ability to err. AS if error was anywhere near as important as deceit.

    But as the 19th and 20th centuries have shown, (if not Kant himself), our civilization was attacked by pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, outright lies and propaganda.

    So my goals are not to eliminate error in the process of invention. My goals are the construction of institutions that prohibit deception.

    And this should be the goal of any moral economists – not just of philosophers.

    Anyway. Thanks for your valuable time. I hope I was able to communicate this rather interesting intersection of epistemology, science, morality and law.

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    ( Eli Harman , Ayelam Valentine Agaliba, Frank Lovell, Bruce Caithness #criticalrationalism #libertarian )

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-24 08:18:00 UTC

  • MY PURPOSE IN REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECON: SCIENCE (from elsewhere) Peter, Thanks fo

    MY PURPOSE IN REFORMING AUSTRIAN ECON: SCIENCE

    (from elsewhere)

    Peter,

    Thanks for the response. Sorry this is long, but it takes what it takes.

    —“Read one way….read another way”—

    Well of course. But then, that is the difference between analytic (empirical criticism) and continental (rational justification). Or more precisely, that’s the difference between science and philosophy.

    But it is not just a binary choice. I can read it a third way: that Mises was a member of the cosmopolitan enlightenment and subject to the category errors of that movement. Just as anglos, french and germans were subject to the errors of their enlightenments: the attempt to universalize local competitive group strategies into general moral rules. That is the goal of each of the enlightenment movements: Anglo island, French imperial, German Territorial, and Jewish diasporic strategies expressed as rational rather than mythological arguments.

    I think it’ might help to understand the purpose for my criticism:

    (1) It’s necessary to the defeat of the broader problem of cosmopolitan pseudoscience, anglo neo-puritanism, postmodern propagandism, and less so, german idealism – in all disciplines.

    (2) It’s necessary to undermine the libertarian problem-children: Rothbardians, who promote psudosicence, objective immorality, pseudorationalism, and justificationism. (People who I am very proud to have done substantial damage to over the past year – and will continue to.)

    3) It’s necessary to restate western liberty in scientific rather than rational terms in order to save the rule of law, and with it, liberty.

    So if I am hard on Mises, it’s because of these three reasons. I have to be. Because without institutionaliing a means of ending deceit, where loading, framing, overloading via propaganda and pseudoscience are principle tools of coercion, there is no possible means of reconstructing liberty.

    I am such an admirer of yours because you are a good and moral man; a great communicator; arguably one of the great teachers in the field; but your incentives as such are sympathetic and explicative, not corrective. Mine are corrective and revolutionary: the problem of pseudoscience (which has a very precise meaning) in economics, which Romer has tried to bring to the forefront, is central to the perceived Heterodoxy of Austrian economics (or more correctly “Moral Economics”).

    Mises was right in this regard: if any economic statement cannot be constructed through subjectively testable operations (human judgements in response to available information) then no proof has been demonstrated. A proof is not confirmation, it is merely a criticism. A means of falsification. If a statement survives a proof, then it is at least existentially possible.

    If it took very smart people in mathematics to create the foundations of mathematics, it will take very smart people in economics to create the foundations of economics – because the well is poisoned. Mises was very close, but for cultural reasons endemic to his era, he failed.

    This is a very complex problem, or someone else would have solved it by now. I am just lucky to live in the internet era, and have had the luxury of studying all of the disciplines, and stumbling upon Mises by accident via Hoppe’s inverted but still brilliant application of economic language to moral argument. All his other errors aside, his pedantic rigor was the first application of operational analysis using property and voluntary exchange to all of social science.

    The operational revolution failed: Minsky in Computer Science, Mises in economics, Bridgman in physics, Brouwer in Math, Popper in Philosophy.

    Einstein demonstrated the problem (frame) and instigated both Brouwer and Bridgman: no premises are certain. None.

    Economics can be the study of objective morality or of objective immorality. At present, the fallacy of majority rule provides incentive to justify objectively immoral economics, and to sideline as heterodox moral economics.

    So saving the west, saving rule of law, saving economics, saving philosophy, saving western truth, and correcting the century of pseudoscience, are all identical problems: completing the minimum set of warranties of due diligence necessary to testify that one has eliminated imaginary content, error, bias, and deceit.

    Austrian economics and conservative social mores are empirical: when the evidence forces change in behavior, then norms and law should reflect it – not before. This is an empirical and anti-hubristic philosophy. But Austrian econ and Conservative social philosophy are not yet scientific: meaning not yet truthfully stated and warrantied.

    That is what I am trying to accomplish (and think I have.)

    Cheers

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-24 03:45:00 UTC

  • THE ECONOMIC METHOD IN CRITICAL RATIONALISM (heavy philosophy warning) (profound

    THE ECONOMIC METHOD IN CRITICAL RATIONALISM

    (heavy philosophy warning) (profound) (austrian econ) (scientific method)

    Math can be stated in a language of NAMES existentially possible operations free of errors of interpretation; or stated in a language of ANALOGIES to operations that are subject to errors of interpretation.

    Math can be used to describe a unique instance in an existential context, or to construct general rules of arbitrary precision independent of existential context.

    With arbitrary precision (independent of real world context) we encounter the problem of decidability (insufficient information) and therefore necessity of the grand label ‘axiom of choice’).

    Much of the language of mathematics obscures the underlying operations upon which all such mathematical statements are constructed. So students usually speak in a ‘language’ of analogy, rather than in a language of ‘names of operations’.

    To circumvent this problem, intutionistic proofs have been suggested as a means of insuring that any deduction is open to operational construction. If it is not, then we cannot claim it is fully criticized.

    This is EXACTLY the same problem we face economics: if any statement of economics is not reducible to subjectively testable operations, we cannot claim that it is fully criticized.

    (Note that this is were Mises failed. He stated that economics was deductive and therefore justifcationary rather than critical process, and the praxeology was a science rather than a test of internal consistency – an error I work daily to correct as a means of rescuing Austrian econ from the Heterodox fringe. )

    Now, because we evolved logic from moral discourse, we used justification. Because we evolved mathematics from the justificationary pre-scientific era, and because mathematical deduction is dependent upon the use of operations (discovery and proof are conducted by the same methods in mathematics), we retained justification. But a proof is not a truth – a proof is a form of criticism that a statement must survive in order for one to testify that it is potentially true.

    The same criterion applies in economics: if we cannot demonstrate that an economic statement can be constructed by subjectively testing a sequence of rational choices, then we cannot warranty that such a statement is existentially possible – and then we cannot say that it has been fully criticized. And as such we cannot warranty that the statement can survive criticism, and we cannot then testify that it is potentially true.

    As such, the means by which we hypothesize is irrelevant – we can construct theories through free association, or by random sentence construction for that matter. What matters is the criticism: due diligence that we have performed.

    The discipline of science is reducible to a series of tests of due diligence, the purpose of which is to eliminate imaginary content, leaving only existential content. If this due diligence is performed, then the author can testify that he speaks as truthfully as possible. Otherwise he cannot testify that he has spoken as truthfully as is possible. (Albeit he can speak truthfully only to those due diligences that he has performed, and those he has not performed.)

    But the reason to practice mainstream macro without subjectively testable micro-foundations, is so that we can justify misinforming individuals (committing fraud) in order to cause them to increase their consumption. As such, mainstream macro is in no small part, the art of deceit: how much can we use the information system provided by prices to deceive people into increasing consumption.

    Whereas the Misesian proposition in economics (and the Hayekian in law) is that we should seek to identify how to inform people truthfully so that we assist them in making mutually beneficial decisions. The jury is still out on whether the accumulated effect of deceit is preferable to the accumulated effect of truth.

    But if the Austrian cycle theory is correct (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), and if the conservative criticisms against denegration of norms, traditions, law, and family structure by this deceit are correct (and I have no reason to believe otherwise) then the Austrian argument will have demonstrated itself to falsify the mainstream argument.

    So, methodologically, we can use the monopoly process we call majority rule; for the construction of monopolistic commons, and we can perform immoral (fraudulent) economics to measure the effects of that monopoly, and we can justify our immoral (fraudulent) monopoly, and immoral (fraudulent) economics and immoral (fraudulent) morality, using fallacious (fraudulent) philosophy that attempts to justify monopoly and takings by aggregate (fragility-producing, equalitarian and dysgenic) measures rather than meritocratic and eugenic) subjective measures.

    OR;

    We can construct economics as a means of conducting research into how to facilitate institutions for the provision of moral actions consisting of truthful statements; and we can use government as a means of providing a market for the construction of contracts for the production of commons; and we can justify (morality is justified, science is criticized) these markets by the uncontestable law of cooperation: the prohibition on free riding – fully articulated as the requirement for productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of negative externality of the same.

    And to assuage the unproductive classes, there is no need for monopoly production of commons only monopoly prohibition on parasitism (free riding), and conversely, the requirement for production – even if one’s production is limited to the defense of the most important commons: property in all its forms, whereby the voluntary organization of production is possible, and without friction.

    Science is, as I have tried to show here, the pursuit of the means of speaking truthfully: warranties that we have eliminated all imaginary content, error, bias, and deception.

    Because the only existentially possible truth is the testimony of an individual that he has performed due diligence to eliminate imaginary content, error, bias, and deception tot he best of his knowledge and ability.

    That is the only existentially possible meaning of truth.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    ( Michael Philip Ayelam Valentine Agaliba Frank Lovell #criticalrationalism #libertarian )

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-24 03:13:00 UTC

  • Yes on Samuelson and Marshall. Reason? JUSTIFICATION IS NOT SCIENTIFIC If one su

    Yes on Samuelson and Marshall. Reason?

    JUSTIFICATION IS NOT SCIENTIFIC

    If one subscribes to the error of justificationism, the method legitimizes the theory. If one subscribes to critical rationalism, the method of theorizing is irrelevant, and the ability of the theory to withstand criticism is its only meaningful test of truth content.

    The problem of ‘mathiness’ is that without reduction to subjectively testable sequence of operational statements, we cannot state that our statements are existentially possible.

    I usually recommend people who understand economics and want to learn to discuss it, read and follow Karl Smith’s writing, because he writes in operational and therefore scientific terms. And that style is the reason he has provided insights that others have previously missed. (He writes less now unfortunately. I would love to see him on a talking head show.)

    And why does Karl write in Operational terms? Because he has non-trivial knowledge of technology. And that’s what software teaches you to do. To avoid the problem of mathiness.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-22 15:14:00 UTC

  • Marx Freud Cantor Boaz Lewontin Frankfurt Krugman, Stiglitz, De Long Mises, Roth

    Marx

    Freud

    Cantor

    Boaz

    Lewontin

    Frankfurt

    Krugman, Stiglitz, De Long

    Mises, Rothbard, Caplan

    Neocons:

    Fritz Lens 1930 Important Geneticist Evolution in the North by hard environment. Group competition wasn’t important. Selected for problem solving, not for aggression. Individualism is part of western uniqueness. (non aggression). High investment in children. Mating on Affection and personal attraction. Personal compatibility. Physical attractiveness. (not cousin marriage). Paternal Involvement. Uniquely tended toward monogamy. Sexual selection for blonde hair and blue eyes. (finer skin) more hair and eye color diversity: personal attraction. Less selected for fearing outsiders. Women have higher status in than in higher cultures.

    Western hunter gatherers (ice age >10K years ago). 7K yerars ago, farmers. more influential in the south. white but more dark skinned. indo europeans 4500 years ago as a military elite. Hunter gatherers are more egalitarian and select leadership. Northern europeans are pretty much that kind.

    Westerners travel the world to take care of others. But no one else does that. This empathy isn’t based upon kinship.

    His argument is genetic.

    (Loneliness)

    Individualism. associated with creativity. (hofstad’s index of patents).

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-20 14:19:00 UTC

  • PROPERTARIANISM AS IMPROVEMENT ON THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT Hayek’s: new era of mys

    PROPERTARIANISM AS IMPROVEMENT ON THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT

    Hayek’s: new era of mysticism (in science).

    Mencius’s: age of propaganda (in politics).

    Doolittle’s: age of pseudoscience (in philosophy)

    Truthfully: the age of deceit.

    From Mencius (Curtis Yarivn)

    —“The basic premise of [The Dark Enlightenment] is that all the competing 20th-century systems of government, including the Western democracies which came out on top and which rule us to this day, are best classified as Orwellian. They maintain their legitimacy by shaping public opinion. They shape public opinion by sculpting the information presented to the public. As part of that public, you peruse the world through a lens poured by your government. ….

    Thus the red pill: any stimulus or stimulant, pharmaceutical or literary, that fundamentally compromises said system of deception. That sounds very medical, but let’s be clear: you are not taking our pill as a public service. At least with our present crude packaging, the remedy is not accessible to any politically significant percentage of citizens. Rather, you are dosing up because you’d rather be high. Despite the agony of ingestion, it’s just too much fun to see your old reality from the outside. This, rather than “society,” is why you will return to UR again and again.”—

    HOWEVER: WE HAVE A CURE

    The thing is, that we cure this ‘age of deceit’ through (a) operationalis (operational language and e-prime, (b) truth telling and warranty of truth telling, (c) making the informational commons into defensible property. Or more positively, outlawing lying in the commons.

    If we did that the entire edifice of lies would collapse in a decade.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-20 06:52:00 UTC

  • WE HAVE A NEW MEMBER : PAUL ROMER (important) Paul hasn’t grasped **IT** quite y

    WE HAVE A NEW MEMBER : PAUL ROMER

    (important)

    Paul hasn’t grasped **IT** quite yet, but he’s on the right track. He calls it “mathiness” but he doesn’t get the Operational Revolution yet.

    I’m going to try to help him make the leap, but I suspect that he’ll not get it either. Time is a painful thing. I soldier onward.

    Fortunately, I’m outside of the academy and the academy’s perverse incentives don’t affect me.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Romer

    MATHINESS PAPER

    http://paulromer.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Mathiness.pdf

    CURRENT LIST OF THE PEOPLE REFORMING THE CENTURY OF PSEUDOSCIENCE:

    The Emerging Consensus :

    – Paul Romer (mathematics or ‘Mathiness’ )

    – Nassim Taleb (anti-fragility) or, information requirements.

    – Ricardo Duchesne (uniqueness of western man)

    – Kevin Macdonald (group evolutionary strategies)

    – Curt Doolittle (Truth, Trust, Law, and Institutions)

    — Jonathan Haidt’s (morality)

    — Pinker (who started it all – psychology)

    — Daniel Kahneman (mind)

    – Stephen Hicks (Postmodernism) (Reluctantly Associated I’m sure)

    – Nial Ferguson (Economics) (Possibly Reluctantly Associated)

    – Martin van Creveld (The Culture of Warfare)

    – Emmanuel Todd (The Evolution of Western Morality and Identity)

    — Meng Hu (statistics ‘anecdote is not data’)

    – Steven Hsu (statistics, intelligence and genetics)

    – Jayman (genetics and history)

    – HBD Chick (the institutions of marriage and family)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-20 05:21:00 UTC

  • THE GENOME BY OTHER THAN BREEDING IS VERY DIFFICULT – AND A LOT LESS FUN —-The

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/05/dont-fear-crispr-babies-2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.BoxnDvpg.dpufALTERING THE GENOME BY OTHER THAN BREEDING IS VERY DIFFICULT – AND A LOT LESS FUN

    —-The largest ever survey of genes associated with IQ found 69 separate genes, which together accounted for less than 8% of the variance in IQ scores, implying that at least hundreds of genes, if not thousands, involved in IQ. (See paper, here.) As Nature reported, even the three genes with the largest individual impact added up to less than two points of IQ:

    The three variants the researchers identified were each responsible for an average of 0.3 points on an IQ test. … That means that a person with two copies of each variant would score 1.8 points higher on an intelligence test than a person with none of them.—-

    http://www.pnas.org/content/111/38/13790.full.pdf

    Source date (UTC): 2015-05-19 21:57:00 UTC

  • Territorial, Institutional, Normative,  and Technological Competitive Value

    (profound) [I]’ve been arguing for two decades that we have had 500 years of ‘unusual’ as we spread the voluntary organization of production around the world (often by force), and conquered and exploited two new continents. And that what we see is the new normal. There aren’t enough asymmetries to exploit any longer to maintain the prior asymmetry of wealth.

    Or rather, normative asymmetries (institutions) are terribly productive and last for generations if maintained, territorial asymmetries are almost as productive, and can last for generations if trade routes are maintained, while technological asymmetries are decreasingly durable. Or as technologists tend to say: “technology is not a competitive advantage” because it is so easily neutralized. Conversely, territorial, trade route, and normative asymmetries produce for the long run. Hence my (and Taleb’s) concern about fragility. And my concern that the progressive fantasy of technology as savior, and norm as inhibitor is backwards.

    Source: Curt Doolittle