Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • Can Professors At Universities Teach And Have Opinions That Are Very Much Contrary To The Scientific Community At Large?

    THE BEST ANSWER YOU WILL FIND

    All university departments hold biases, and the careers of the members of the department depend upon upholding those biases, because of the incentives to publish, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the university and departments that was inherited from the church – which invented the university.  There is very little practical difference between the practice of ideology and the practice of academic research in this regard. In practice, ideas die with their originators and sponsors, not when they are disproved. The investment is too high. The incentive to over-invest in a paradigm to retain one’s position is too high.  This is why students must choose departments based upon what the department members publish.

    Sowell’s recommended “fix” is to financially and organizationally separate research departments (that do not serve the interests of students whatsoever) from teaching departments (whose only concern is the students) but the administration (serving neither the students or the researchers) is currently consuming all the vast investment americans are making in educations (that have questionable return, and in some cases negative return.)  Realistically if undergrad students paid teaching professors, not researchers, for their education, and we regulated administration and capital acquisition to 20% of fees, education would be absurdly inexpensive, and students would leave with little debt.  We could then ask grad students and phd students and the government to bear the costs of research, rather than the undergrads. And we would shrink the administration back to it’s necessary and sufficient size.  (Financially, academia now has absorbed all the costs originally saved by eliminating the church.  For all intents and purposes, we have merely replaced academia and church with academia. In fact, I am pretty confident that academia is far more expensive than the post-enlightenment church was in every form of capital consumption.)

    But the university system is not designed for students and their careers, it is designed to provide economic rents to researchers and administrators, by selling faulty products to students,  that in any other industry would be open to class action lawsuits for fraudulent representation, and possible only because of inflationary pressure on by the government, in the same way that the government created inflationary pressure on the housing industry leading to the 2008 crash.

    See Sowell’s work and Caplan’s work.  Caplan is always someone you must be skeptical of nearly everything he says, so his his empirical work is what you can appreciate, but you must ignore all his conclusions. (Sort of like reading Marx.)

    https://www.quora.com/Can-professors-at-universities-teach-and-have-opinions-that-are-very-much-contrary-to-the-scientific-community-at-large

  • How Can I Know How People View Me As A Person?

    Stop having ignorant, liberal-ed twits write bot-like questions that do nothing more than persist postmodern pseudoscience?

    Learn something empirical. Ok?

    https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-know-how-people-view-me-as-a-person

  • Can Professors At Universities Teach And Have Opinions That Are Very Much Contrary To The Scientific Community At Large?

    THE BEST ANSWER YOU WILL FIND

    All university departments hold biases, and the careers of the members of the department depend upon upholding those biases, because of the incentives to publish, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the university and departments that was inherited from the church – which invented the university.  There is very little practical difference between the practice of ideology and the practice of academic research in this regard. In practice, ideas die with their originators and sponsors, not when they are disproved. The investment is too high. The incentive to over-invest in a paradigm to retain one’s position is too high.  This is why students must choose departments based upon what the department members publish.

    Sowell’s recommended “fix” is to financially and organizationally separate research departments (that do not serve the interests of students whatsoever) from teaching departments (whose only concern is the students) but the administration (serving neither the students or the researchers) is currently consuming all the vast investment americans are making in educations (that have questionable return, and in some cases negative return.)  Realistically if undergrad students paid teaching professors, not researchers, for their education, and we regulated administration and capital acquisition to 20% of fees, education would be absurdly inexpensive, and students would leave with little debt.  We could then ask grad students and phd students and the government to bear the costs of research, rather than the undergrads. And we would shrink the administration back to it’s necessary and sufficient size.  (Financially, academia now has absorbed all the costs originally saved by eliminating the church.  For all intents and purposes, we have merely replaced academia and church with academia. In fact, I am pretty confident that academia is far more expensive than the post-enlightenment church was in every form of capital consumption.)

    But the university system is not designed for students and their careers, it is designed to provide economic rents to researchers and administrators, by selling faulty products to students,  that in any other industry would be open to class action lawsuits for fraudulent representation, and possible only because of inflationary pressure on by the government, in the same way that the government created inflationary pressure on the housing industry leading to the 2008 crash.

    See Sowell’s work and Caplan’s work.  Caplan is always someone you must be skeptical of nearly everything he says, so his his empirical work is what you can appreciate, but you must ignore all his conclusions. (Sort of like reading Marx.)

    https://www.quora.com/Can-professors-at-universities-teach-and-have-opinions-that-are-very-much-contrary-to-the-scientific-community-at-large

  • How Can I Know How People View Me As A Person?

    Stop having ignorant, liberal-ed twits write bot-like questions that do nothing more than persist postmodern pseudoscience?

    Learn something empirical. Ok?

    https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-know-how-people-view-me-as-a-person

  • WHAT IS THE NEXT ITERATION AFTER CRITICAL RATIONALISM? (worth repeating) I consi

    WHAT IS THE NEXT ITERATION AFTER CRITICAL RATIONALISM?

    (worth repeating)

    I consider myself a critical rationalist as far as it goes. But:

    1) I practice the art with much higher technical standards necessary to reduce or eliminate error and deception. In my view I practice philosophy as science not rationalism. It is possible that I have come to see all rationalism as justification. I am not yet certain. I do however understand the very great difference between daydreaming, thinking, reasoning, calculating and computing. And that reason is vastly inferior to calculation. And that if I am correct, and property provides us with commensurability then moral and political conflicts are marginally calculable.

    2) I do not believe that CP is empirically true although it is logically true. Only formal study will answer this question but at present the evidence certainly appears to bear out my bias.

    3) I do not believe criticism is as productive a means of innovation as exhausting theories and reforming them – which is why scientists practice exhaustion not criticism. The reason is scientists pursue goals (problems), not knowledge for its own sake (puzzles).

    4) There is no difference between any method of investigation or production other than the value attributed to different outputs of the method we call the scientific method.

    5) Although I believe Miller’s loosely correct, I also believe his emphasis on formal logic (sets) is not equal in value to operational articulation, and is likewise subject to verbalism. In fact, in large part I see the era of set operations involving language as passé, and that like law, functions and operations defeat sets and set membership. In fact, I see Cantorian sets as one of the great disasters of intellectual history.

    (Not that anyone here is going to follow what the hell I’m talking about…)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-26 08:47:00 UTC

  • (more thoughts) Either libertarianism stands scientific criticism or it doesn’t.

    (more thoughts)

    Either libertarianism stands scientific criticism or it doesn’t. So far it doesn’t. And either an argument can be constructed scientifically or it can’t. I can and have constructed it scientifically where it is open falsification. It can be criticized by rational argument. It can be weakly falsified by surveys, and it can be hard-falsified by experiment. Why should libertarianism be buried in the backwater of pseudoscience? It would be one thing if it had to be, and therefore had to remain an ideology, and neither a philosophy or a scientifically supportable argument. But that isn’t the case. If we CAN state libertarianism scientifically then what are we afraid of other than the rather obvious fact that to construct a state of liberty one will require a high trust polity that suppresses unethical as well as at least SOME immoral conduct?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-21 18:38:00 UTC

  • David Gordon pretty much eviscerates Lester’s argument on Lester’s terms – which

    David Gordon pretty much eviscerates Lester’s argument on Lester’s terms – which is perhaps the most gracious way of doing so. I have a better understanding of Popper’s arguments than David so I’m producing my own criticism, not just of lester but of all cosmopolitan thinkers in the space, Lester included. It’s just odd to see someone so graceful about it.

    What I like about David’s criticism, is it shows just why non-operational, non-testimonial arguments are so open to deception. I suppose that, from Lester’s writing (and my few conversations with him) that he merely applies the ideas of popper in an autistic but uncomprehending attempt to justify libertarianism, while at the same time claiming he does not practice justification. But as Gordon points out, he uses falsification as a means of distraction in the marxist tradition rather than as a means of hardening his theories.

    Further, Popper’s arguments are warnings against the excessive use of certainty in science, where general descriptions of very causally dense theories an appear to be true (Keynesian and post-keynesian economic theory, Freudian Psychology, Cantorian Logic) but are merely useful allegories for conveying meaning. They are not scientific and therefore should not be used for the purpose of persuasion only for the purpose of conveying MEANING. Popper commits this sin everywhere. He conveys meaning, not necessity. ie: he creates meaningful narratives but rarely if ever constructs necessary arguments. Even his Critical Preference is logically but it appears not empirically true. Part of the verbalist era of logic in the early twentieth century: it is not clear that that many of our theories are erroneous, rather that they are as precise as the information we have, and that we seem to be fairly good at increasing precision via testing, even if we are not very good at increasing precision via modeling.

    More later.

    The problem is, we don’t have people in the libertarian movement capable of making these arguments. I think they exist in math and physics, but I kind of suspect that in the libertarian movement we just don’t have the talent.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-21 18:04:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://phys.org/news/2014-09-natural-born-killers-chimpanzee-violence.html

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-20 07:52:00 UTC

  • MORE ON HUMAN SCALE You know, empiricism (observation) and instrumentalism (inst

    MORE ON HUMAN SCALE

    You know, empiricism (observation) and instrumentalism (instrumental observation) are demarcated by the limits of our sense perception. But the process is essentially the same.

    I would prefer to get the point across that the reason we require instrumentalism is that once we pass beyond our sense perception, we also pass beyond human scale.

    I consider economics to be instrumental : a discipline for measuring that which is directly unobservable, and therefore only indirectly observable.

    Just as I consider all logics to be instruments, and any human action that does not require such instruments within human scale.

    This distinction turns out to be terribly important once we realize just WHY Bridgman was so concerned about operationalism, why Poincare so concerned about mathematical platonism, why Brouwer was so concerned about mathematical operationalism and intuitionism, and why **I** am so concerned about both verbal operationalism and testimonial truth, and it’s opposite: the use of verbalisms (obscurant analogies), loading and framing.

    Because we have been systematically applying the methods, including mathematical methods, but more importantly, the philosophical methods, that we developed during the era of human scale where we could reason without instruments, to the era of post-human scale where we cannot sense perceive without instruments. And there is a vast difference in the properties of human scale and post-human scale measurements.

    Most important of these, at least in economics, is morality. Morality is a local phenomenon and macro economics is NOT. Just as we cannot apply the morals of the famly to the extended order, we cannot likewise apply the rules of the extended order to the family.

    Now, if we apply the rules of the family to the extended order our efforts will be non-predictive. That is merely an empirical or perhaps epistemological criticism. But when we apply the rules of the extended order (non-moral) to the rules of the family and tribal (moral) then we commit suicide.

    Macroeconomics as I understand it is merely a secular christian crusade against aristocracy by the Cathedral. It is not we who are conquering the cathedral. But the out-group nations who understand that the cathedral’s immorality is socially destructive religion, both for it’s hosts (us) and everyone touched by it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-16 13:04:00 UTC

  • ECONOMICS AND DISCIPLINARY IMMORALITY (profound) In Response to Peter Boettke on

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/opinion/paul-krugman-how-to-get-economic-policy-wrong.htmlKRUGMAN, ECONOMICS AND DISCIPLINARY IMMORALITY

    (profound)

    In Response to Peter Boettke on Krugman

    https://www.facebook.com/peter.boettke/posts/10154638641450389

    Krugman is wrong, and his narrative is wrong, because he is an immoral man. And as an immoral man he cannot grasp that men act morally, and therefore that economics cannot ignore morality as a causal property of human action.

    It is not the providence of economists to impose immorality on the world. But this is Krugman’s self-appointed position. Where most of us would make moral statements he simply substitutes accusations of stupidity or ignorance whenever morality interferes with temporary economic efficiency. He not only ignores morality, he crusades against morality. But why?

    Krugman is perhaps the best practitioner today of the Culture of Critique. And our failure to understand that this is his technique, is why so few people grasp that his systemic immorality, no different from say, Freud, Rothbard or Adorno, is for the purpose of advancing the fallacy that economics creates peaceful cooperation rather than has evolved to be merely warfare by mutually constructed means, rather than warfare by mutually destructive means. That we compete for our famly and tribe by means of production rather than destruction does not alter the fact hat we are competing for our family and tribe – and if we do not compete for our family and tribe, then evolution will punish us. And evolution is punishing anglo-europeans at present precisely for that failure.

    The anglo enlightenment fallacies of universalism (restated christianity), when combined with the cosmopolitan enlightenment fallacies (make the world safe for judaism’s separatism) allow us to imagine and perpetuate the pretense of universalism.

    However, the rest of the world practices not universalism but tribalism, nationalism, or cultism, and the only reason we have been able to fool ourselves into the fallacy of universalism is the anglo superiority in arms, and the conquest of the germanic civilization by the anglo.

    During the run-up to the crisis and for two years after, I systematically wrote responses to Krugman that stated that his ideas could not ever be accomplished because a democratic people would not tolerate immorality from their rulers, and a despot would not ever practice that immorality because it would weaken his power. There are no conditions under which any but an anglo-educated anglo-indoctrinated, enlightenment-fallacy individual would think otherwise. With the decline of the anglo-american empire has arrived, and will continue, the decline of the fallacy, if not religion, of anglo-american universalism, and the cosmopolitan fallacy of open borders, free trade, and economics as the justificationary basis of universalist religion.

    Krugman is wrong because he is non-predictive. 20th century Economics is not predictive because it is IMMORAL in that it does not incorporate morality or family. In fact just the opposite. Taken to most efficient levels, the family and morality would be destroyed and largely have been.

    This is a devastating criticism of economics as a profession. In particular, because there reason that contemporary macro economics is explicative but non-predictive of political action, is in no small part, not because economists are ignored, or because politicians do not understand the ideas and recommendations of economists, but because politicians understand that the public is a MORAL body, and must be, and always will be.

    Germans will not morally accept italian and greek corruption and laziness, and white americans will not tolerate redistribution to impulsive people of color – because they see the other’s behavior as immoral. The more conservative they are (and conservatism is a genetic bias, just like progressivism) the more tribally they will act to advance their kin.

    Until economics incorporates these fundamental realities of human behavior it will remain NON-CORRESPONDENT with demonstrated human action, and therefore unscientific, and ideologically biased.

    While I am very close to finishing the work of correcting libertarianism (liberalism), restating it analytically, and restoring it to its aristocratic egalitarian ethos, and laundering it of the enlightenment fallacies of universalism, equality of ability and interests, I hope to live long enough to put morality back into economics – which as practiced, and as advocated by Krugman (and Delong et al).

    Economics is merely warfare while producing instead of destroying. It is not a vehicle for christian universalism. And the world is returning to that natural order now that the anglo advantage in cultural warfare, economic warfare and military warfare, wanes.

    Man acts tribally and must act tribally, because those groups that do not act tribally are have been, and will be, eradicated by those groups that act tribally.

    This is a damning criticism of the field, and Krugman is a justifiably damned advocate of immorality. An advocate I hope some day is as justifiably reviled as every other practitioner of pseudoscience and obscurantism for immoral purposes.

    This may seem a radical position, but as Hayek advised and I have spent my life attempting to understand the reasons for, the twentieth century will be remembered as an era of re-emergent mysticism in the form of fallacious universalist beliefs justified by pseudoscience, perpetuated by correlations rather than causations.

    Which is the underlying problem of economics that Mises intuited but could not solve – because he was himself a victim of cosmopolitan fallacies. He sought to justify universalism, but created his own pseudoscientific verbalism like the other cosmopolitans.

    Economics will not be a science until it is causal, and it cannot be causal if it is immoral. And universalism is immoral because it is suicidal.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-16 06:30:00 UTC