Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • MACRO ECONOMIC PHENOMENON ARE EMERGENT AND NON DEDUCIBLE Macro economic phenomen

    MACRO ECONOMIC PHENOMENON ARE EMERGENT AND NON DEDUCIBLE

    Macro economic phenomenon are emergent, not deducible. They are often explainable. And the discipline of macro economics attempts to explain those phenomenon. Yet many phenomenon are still not yet explainable. Although rapid increase in economics in the past twenty years has improved the field dramatically.

    Any given price for example, is often not explainable. Nor did we nor could we have deduced the stickiness of prices. Nor can we deduce the time frame of phenomenon.

    It is true for example that in the long run, money may be neutral, but that does not mean that interference in the supply of money cannot be used to create beneficial temporary advantages even if they are neutralized over time.

    It is true that unemployment will increase with minimum wages, but the reasons for this are not those proposed by cosmopolitan-Austrians. They are because people lose the possibility of entry into the work force when they are young and become permanently unemployable. Empirical evidence does not support the assumption that minor increases are statistically meaningful. Only that, say, in the french model, do we see statistically meaningful permanent unemployment.

    So, emergent phenomenon are not deducible. They are instrumentally and empirically observable. And once observed may be explained by deduction. But this is indifferent from physical phenomenon, where phenomenon are emergent.

    But to say that we can deduce all economic activity – all human action – from first principles is demonstrably false. We cannot.

    To say that we can deduce all mathematical phenomenon, logical phenomenon, physical phenomenon from first principles is demonstrably false.

    At scale, beyond our perceptions, we must rely upon empirical evidence for observation, instrumentation to obtain that evidence, and deduction to theorize the construction of those phenomenon.

    The false-flag, straw-man argument against empiricism, states that we must be able to run tests, thereby constructing data sets, rather than merely observe phenomenon and explain that phenomenon. But science does not practice empiricism. It practices the scientific method. And physical science takes this experimental approach only to discover first principles, not to analyze emergent phenomenon. Red shift is not something we need to create conditions for, it is something we must simply observe.

    Conversely, experimentally constructed evidence is LESS reliable than naturally occurring evidence. So experimentation is a means of creating conditions for observation. Observation is what is required for analysis.

    Likewise, we do not need to discover the first principles of man, but we must discover and explain the emergent phenomenon of man’s actions.

    And even in those cases where we can construct a very loose economic principle, that does not mean that we cannot take action to alter the interstitial conditions and conduct experiments upon how we can effect those conditions and for how long. The Keynesian argument is that even if the Austrian business cycle is true, the good obtained in the interim is worth the risk, because states under fiat currency – unless they overextend by war and shock – cannot fail and become insolvent.

    In any and all cases of the anti-scientific arguments put forth by the rothbardian rationalists I will easily demonstrate that each case is a straw man argument.

    Because that is the technique of Critique: the marxist and cosmopolitan device of creating a straw man argument that is sufficiently obscurant that it is possible to load, frame, and overload the average, and even above average human mind.

    It is the greatest form of deception ever constructed by man.

    While we can look back in awe at monotheism as a great deception for the purpose of imposing authoritarian rule – despite its absurdity. And while we can look back in awe at how successful the marxists were. We can also grasp that libertinism (the cosmopolitan wing of Austrian economics) is yet another instance of the same technique: create an unbelievable lie, repeat it, and defend it with straw men. Libertinism is merely cosmopolitan separatism in new dress. It didnt’ work, it wont work, and it can’t work.

    Libertines cannot hold land. And he who holds land determines the basis of law. That is an inescapable law of human action.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-23 01:14:00 UTC

  • ON THE VIRTUE OF CRITICISM Without something to criticize I would have nothing t

    ON THE VIRTUE OF CRITICISM

    Without something to criticize I would have nothing to calculate. My reasons for trying to improve upon critical rationalism are external to physical sciences and partly external to epistemology: they’re in ethics and politics. Meaning, that there is a difference between permissible argument in pursuit of the most parsimonious truth (analytic or platonic truth) where no external costs are imposed upon others, and pursuit of truthful statements along the journey wherever external costs are imposed upon others. But the central ideas are still the same: seek criticism, and criticize. When you do – and especially if others do you the favor of defending their positions, and criticizing yours – you learn. I intuit a set of patterns on the very edge of perception, and just criticize whatever fragments I can sense on the way getting there. And that takes an absurd amount of patience and discipline, because (as followers probably can tell) it can take you YEARS to make incremental improvements in important theories. You cannot make a baby in less than nine months and it seems you cannot make a philosophy in less then seven to ten years.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-21 10:30:00 UTC

  • MORAL OBLIGATION TO SUPPRESS ROTHBARDIAN PSEUDOSCIENCE (from elsewhere) If you d

    MORAL OBLIGATION TO SUPPRESS ROTHBARDIAN PSEUDOSCIENCE

    (from elsewhere)

    If you don’t claim economics isn’t an empirical science, and that praxeology isn’t a loose statement of operationalism, that apriorisitc reasoning produces apolitically certain premises, that rights ‘exist’ without a consensual contract, that the NAP is sufficient for the formation of a voluntary polity, or that rothbardian ethics are either objectively ethical, or capable of producing an anarchic polity, then that’s good enough for me.

    Just doing my job trying to rescue liberty from the lunatic fringe.

    Some things are too serious to leave to crypto-marxists.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-18 09:59:00 UTC

  • ARGUMENT MAKES US LOOK STUPID AND HURTS THE LIBERTY MOVEMENT – EVERY SINGLE TIME

    http://mises.org/library/should-economics-emulate-natural-sciencesHIS ARGUMENT MAKES US LOOK STUPID AND HURTS THE LIBERTY MOVEMENT – EVERY SINGLE TIME IT IS WRITTEN OR UTTERED

    Pseudoscience hurts us. Conspiracy theory hurts us. Immoralism hurts us. Rothbard hurts us every day. MI has got to stop their absurdity. Cosmopolitanism, Marxism, Socialism, Postmodernism, Libertinism, and Neoconservatism are all dead campaigns from the era when we assumed democracy would prevail, and ideologies were needed to use the voting booth or revolution in order to sieze power. They were lies. Very complex lies. The high art of lying was invented in the construction of monotheism, and mastered over many generations to emerge as german rationalism and cosmopolitan pseudoscience.

    FALLACIES

    The argument in the article is false. We *MAY* not be able to ascertain the first principle, or principles of the physical universe – although that appears increasingly likely that we can. Certainly Hawking thinks we are less than a century away from it. It is becoming difficult to understand how we might even fail to understand it.

    Laws in physics can absolutely be established at given scales, newton’s laws are precise enough for all human action at human scale. Einstein’s laws are precise enough for all possible human actions that we are currently capable of. But just as Einstein did not falsify newton’s laws within human scale, it is very unlikely that any further advancement in theoretical physics will invalidate Einstein’s theories at the scale in which he applied them. THe fact that we can use plasma cutters does not mean carpenters were engaged in error, only that they were working at lower degrees of precision – at human scale.

    We have observed many laws in the physical universe that are constant within a given scale, and since all actions take place within a given scale, we require only precision within a scale necessary for action. (this is a profound statement that is easily overlooked in our search for a single rule (an ideal type) rather than a spectrum of rules applicable for actions at any given scale.)

    We may also, in the future, see odd permutations in the physical universe that we cannot explain, but that we need not repeat study of once those laws are understood. Except that is, when we pass beyond one scale or another. This is the reason for experimentation, NOT CONFIRMATION. The reason science requires operational demonstration is that we cannot anticipate the limits (scale) of any set of premises. And as we saw with time and length, very basic assumptions about the world change at different scales of precision. The subatomic world may seem very small and imaginary but we reach that scale far more quickly than we seem to think – and we toss around numbers that represent quantities, and mathematical measurements, that are far larger than than the smallest possible physically existential meaning of the term ‘length’.

    HUMAN AFFAIRS

    In human affairs we may reduce economic propositions to a sequence of necessary human actions, and all such human actions are decidable – at least in the aggregate. This is true. Because we ourselves are identical enough in our ability to sympathize with one another’s decisions to make rational choices. But we cannot yet make the same claim about the physical universe.

    We cannot say the same about groups of humans either – except at general, and abstract scale. So when we make a statemetn about commercial human action, that tells us very little. Prices are most often marginally indifferent, and for other than commodities, we make most of our decisions by other means. The general behavior of populations varies significantly from country to country (Russian tolerance for suffering, and American tolerance for change as interesting examples.) And these biases are not deducible from first principles even if, under some scrutiny and with some work, they are explainable (operationalizable).

    We still do not now for example, how long it takes and under which conditions a minimum wage will propagate through the economy, we only know that as a general rule that it will have some negative affect on some people or other. We can deduce (and frequently measure) that it produces permanently unemployable who miss bottom entry into the workforce.

    But this does not tell us much of value, it is like saying the wind blows most often from the west, but tells us nothing how we should navigate the sea from bristol to the cape this season.

    We may never be able to model gasses or protein foldings or economies particularly well other than in the aggregate. We may not be able to make general statements about human beings either except in the aggregate. But it is very likely that we can make general statements about humans and gasses sufficient for all necessary, possible, and affordable human action regarding humans and gasses.

    Just as new property rights applications must be invented (laws), in human affairs, just as in the physical universe, the consequences of complexity are vast, and require constant empirical measurement, because humans are always inventing new ways of doing things and any action we took yesterday has produced multiple adaptations. The universe is not. It cannot try to outwit itself, but man is constantly benefitting from outwitting the course of events and capturing the difference in states for his benefit.

    I could go on, but I have beaten this particular rothbardian fallacy to death already – not that I needed to since Einstein did it himself.

    To know anything of any scale that is not directly experiential we must make use of different technologies to compensate for our limited cognitive and perceptive abilities:

    Instrumental (measurable if not observable)

    Empirical (observable and recordable)

    Operational (existentially demonstrable)

    Logical (internal consistency)

    Decidable (sufficient information to make a decision)

    Theoretical ( Hypothesis->Theory->Law)

    (continued…)

    2 mins · Like

    Curt Doolittle (… continued)

    THE CORRECT ARGUMENT – CORRECTING THE ROTHBARDIAN FALLACY

    1) All economics is empirical, just as all sciences are empirical. It is just that we do not require hypothetical or instrumental means of testing propositions in economics – we ourselves are the instrument and as such are capable of determining whether propositions are decidable and how.

    2) Economists do not try to understand man except as a byproduct of their work – they try to understand how to use Fiscal, Monetary, Trade, Educational, Cultural, and institutional Policy to produce economic velocity. To cast their work as the study of action is dishonest, and to cast economics as the study of human action is dishonest, since human action is primarily subjective, cooperative, moral and reproductive and only economic as a consequence, of being subjective, cooperative, moral and reproductive

    3) Economic interference IS IMMORAL when it causes involuntary transfers (independent of prohibiting free riding), or negative externalities. It is not unscientific. It’s just immoral. We don’t need to make pseudoscientific nonsense-arguments based upon absurd marxist and german rationalism in order to criticize redistributive economics in an attempt at imitating marxist socialist and postmodern methods of argumentative deception. Economic interference is immoral. it’s theft. It’s involuntary transfer. It’s not unscientific. It’s just theft. That’s all. Theft is just as open to scientific analysis as is voluntary exchange.

    The opposite is true: it is unscientific to claim that economics isn’t instrumental, empirical, operational, decidable and theoretical – just like all human knowledge. It’s dishonest (and false) to state that economic premises are apodictically certain at other than very large scale and in unpredictable time frames. Einstein demonstrably killed apriorism for non-reductio cases forever – and economics is not a reductio domain.

    4) The study of MORAL Economics would be the discipline of political economy and the institutional means by which to facilitate voluntary exchanges between individuals for the construction of commons without the need for involuntary redistribution to produce commons. This is what I have tried (and I think succeeded) in doing in Propertarianism.

    It is non-rational to adopt the ghetto ethic of denying the competitive value of commons, when hight rust and property rights themselves are commons that were only producible in the west because the west’s primary competitive advantage is in the production of COMMONS. As such an attack on commons is an attack on the west. (Which is in no small part the cosmopolitan strategy.) And it is this immorality that I chastise in rothbardians on a daily basis.

    A government of voluntary exchanges in the production of commons is no more immoral than a market of voluntary exchanges for the purpose of production, trade, distribution and consumption. None.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-18 06:43:00 UTC

  • END OF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA – BECAUSE OF SCIENCE AND EVIDENCE The Progressive fan

    END OF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA – BECAUSE OF SCIENCE AND EVIDENCE

    The Progressive fantasy was that reason and speech could overwhelm our and defeat our genes. But all they did was to give license to them – degeneracy.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-16 02:51:00 UTC

  • THOUGHTS ON OPERATIONALISM AND FALSIFICATIONISM Still thinking because I can’t q

    THOUGHTS ON OPERATIONALISM AND FALSIFICATIONISM

    Still thinking because I can’t quite grasp ..hmm.. and I think it’s like falsification – that if an argument (a theory) isn’t falsifiable then it isn’t scientific. And that …. well, that something isn’t ‘scientific’ is a non-operational statement – its like saying it’s good or heavenly, but that doesn’t tell us anything. Internal consistency, external correspondence and existential possibility do tell us something.

    —“operationalise a concept likes suppression”–

    Damn…. finally… I know how to talk about it…. YAY!

    Thank you Ayelam Valentine Agaliba. For some reason you always give me the most helpful breadcrumbs…. the only people in this world worth anything in epistemology are CR’s.

    I am too under the weather this morning to write something meaningful. But I can now show that the way I am using operationalism is as a further extension of falsificationism for those cases where our sense and perceptions are sufficient for decidability (social sciences). Or I would invert it: that falsification is a lower standard of operationalism for those cases when our sense and perception are insufficient for decidability (the physical universe).

    Well that is a good way to start off a day even if it’s a day with a headache…

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 02:54:00 UTC

  • ARE MANKIND’S WARRIOR ANTS “We applied a machinelearning method to fMRI data to

    http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(14)01213-5CONSERVATIVES ARE MANKIND’S WARRIOR ANTS

    “We applied a machinelearning method to fMRI data to test the hypotheses that brain responses to emotionally evocative images predict individual scores on a standard political ideology assay. Disgusting images, especially those related to animal reminder

    disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants’ conscious rating of the stimuli. Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-14 06:18:00 UTC

  • FOODS AND THE CATHEDRAL: PSEUDOSCIENCE AS RELIGION Their business plan is to ope

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.htmlWHOLE FOODS AND THE CATHEDRAL: PSEUDOSCIENCE AS RELIGION

    Their business plan is to open near colleges, where acolytes of the cathedral gather in great numbers.

    (It’s actually fascinating.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-12 02:14:00 UTC

  • Criticism: Tech As Belief In New Gods

    [T]he only energy technology that we are going to use and depend upon is nuclear, helped by water, and as a minor contributor – solar, because it’s the only source of energy strategically tolerable to depend upon. 

    And while teenage boys like to fantasize about star trek technology, adult men only spend vast amounts of money on strategically defensible assets. – That’s Just How It Is. 

    The way you get to be in charge of money is because people put you in charge of money, and people put you in charge of money largely because they trust what you will do with it. And that means the use of loss aversion, and opportunity cost to make decisions. And expensive, failure-prone, strategically indefensible, and therefore vulnerability-inducing assets are pretty unintelligent investments.

    We will explore space when we develop both an extremely light craft big enough for humans to trundle around in, AND an engine capable of efficient conversion of energy to velocity, at constant acceleration of one G or greater. We already have cheap means of flying stuff into orbit. That’s why there is so much in low orbit already. But there appears to be less free ‘stuff’ in space to convert into energy along the way so we are going to have to act like primitive ships and move from mass-port to mass-port, and spending more time traveling because we cannot carry the mass with us to convert into energy.

    It is possible that we will discover or invent the interstellar equivalent of hydrocarbons (a very dense store of energy for newtonian scale), but as yet we don’t know of such a thing even though from what precious little we understand about the universe, such a thing should be possible in theory even if in practice we cannot find a means of constructing it.

  • Criticism: Tech As Belief In New Gods

    [T]he only energy technology that we are going to use and depend upon is nuclear, helped by water, and as a minor contributor – solar, because it’s the only source of energy strategically tolerable to depend upon. 

    And while teenage boys like to fantasize about star trek technology, adult men only spend vast amounts of money on strategically defensible assets. – That’s Just How It Is. 

    The way you get to be in charge of money is because people put you in charge of money, and people put you in charge of money largely because they trust what you will do with it. And that means the use of loss aversion, and opportunity cost to make decisions. And expensive, failure-prone, strategically indefensible, and therefore vulnerability-inducing assets are pretty unintelligent investments.

    We will explore space when we develop both an extremely light craft big enough for humans to trundle around in, AND an engine capable of efficient conversion of energy to velocity, at constant acceleration of one G or greater. We already have cheap means of flying stuff into orbit. That’s why there is so much in low orbit already. But there appears to be less free ‘stuff’ in space to convert into energy along the way so we are going to have to act like primitive ships and move from mass-port to mass-port, and spending more time traveling because we cannot carry the mass with us to convert into energy.

    It is possible that we will discover or invent the interstellar equivalent of hydrocarbons (a very dense store of energy for newtonian scale), but as yet we don’t know of such a thing even though from what precious little we understand about the universe, such a thing should be possible in theory even if in practice we cannot find a means of constructing it.