Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY. I suspect that at this point Popper

    HOPPE IS WRONG ON POPPER – AND THIS IS WHY.

    I suspect that at this point Popper would suggest that all our attempts at social engineering have failed. And that we should constrain our ambitions to improving the institutions that facilitate economic calculation.

    While Hans attacks Popper for his piecemeal social engineering, the fact of the matter is, that Popper’s philosophical work is the closest to that of Propertarianism yet stated in the Germanic languages.

    I don’t criticize Hans for his imperfections: (a) that private property rights are logically sufficient for the suppression of demand for the state, and (b) that argumentation is not causal, (c) that praxeological statements are a-prioristically deductive, rather than sympathetically testable. Instead, I focus on what he got RIGHT – the incentives of monarchs vs rentiers, and the structure of non-monopolistic formal institutions

    I think we can forgive popper his open door to experimentation, and take from him what we can: that GiVEN THE FRAILTY OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, COERCIVE GOVERNMENT IS NEVER MORAL and never can be.

    Popper’s prohibition on truth claims is a moral one. And given that Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe are all WRONG in the interpretation of truth claims of Praxeology, and the structure of economic science, we’ve simply proven that not only is Popper RIGHT, but Popper has told us how to correct praxeology. Or at least that is how i was able to understand how to correct praxeology.

    Unfortunately, other than Hans it’s not possible to find many libertarians smart enough to have this level of discussion with. And I suspect he won’t appreciate it much. 🙂

    I need to get hans off of this argument. He’s wrong. Plain and simple. Popper is an asset not a liability. The prohibition on piecemeal engineering is one that POPPER gave us, NOT Mises.

    We can never claim to know enough to forcibly use other’s money for theoretical ends. The content in our myths, habits and traditions is also more dense than our understanding of those myths, habits and traditions. We may know how to USE those traditions. But like any complex technology we may not have knowledge of their CONSTRUCTION. And we certainly cannot observe the totality of their externalities – any more than we can observe the totality of the externality of prices.

    That’s Popper’s gift to us. That was Hayek’s gift to us. Hayek and Popper were closer to the answer than Mises – who, by applying Weber and Poincare, correctly understood economic calculation, but failed to grasp that economic science was not a-prioristic, but entirely empirical. He confused our ability to sympathetically test any human action for rational incentives, with the ability to deduce anything meaningful from the necessity for rational action.

    Curt Doolittle

    Propertarianism

    Rescuing liberty from the ethics of the ghetto, one paragraph at a time.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-02 16:53:00 UTC

  • I guess I’ve sort of turned critical rationalism on it’s head, and stated that s

    I guess I’ve sort of turned critical rationalism on it’s head, and stated that science is a more SIMPLE theoretical system that addresses but a subset of the requirements for theory, and that by extending the scientific method to the social sciences (morality) we make obvious that the scientific method is simply ‘the epistemic method’ and that it’s the only one available to us.

    Cool. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 09:45:00 UTC

  • THE CANONS OF THEORY (reposted for archival purposes) If you understand (a) the

    THE CANONS OF THEORY

    (reposted for archival purposes)

    If you understand (a) the scientific method, and (b) Critical Rationalism AND (c) economic epistemology and (d) a bit of cognitive science we can extend the ‘science of theories” as placing the following constraints on us:

    1) Explanatory Power (it survives as a general rule in a multitude of examples – theory means ‘general rule’) +

    2) Testable : Verifiability + Falsifiability (we can think of multiple examples where we can verify it, and it further survives contradiction by a multitude of examples) +

    3) Compactness (it is insulated from obscurantism and error) +

    4) Parsimony (it is insulated from obscurantism an error by a minimum of dependencies) +

    5) Empirical (observable, perceptible – even if only through instrumentation, such as tools or prices.) +

    6) Constructable (can be stated as a sequence of observable human actions – ie: it’s possible or ‘real’) +

    7) Rational (incentives – once reduced to statements of construction it each of which is open to sympathetic testing, we can directly perceive the rationality of any incentive.) This is the meaning of Praxeology that Mises mistook for the a-priori.

    In the case of Human Action the Empirical (observable) requirement, places the constraint on any theory that at all states of a sequence of actions, the incentives of the actors are rational.

    This definition of THEORY is the modification to the scientific method that I’ve added to Propertarianism.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2014-03-01 09:42:00 UTC

  • THE ERRORS OF PRAXEOLOGY CORRECTED (cross posted for archival purposes.) I would

    THE ERRORS OF PRAXEOLOGY CORRECTED

    (cross posted for archival purposes.)

    I would like to weigh in on this discussion but so far it’s a mess.

    a) If you want to make claims about Praxeology, then please define praxeology, the praxeological method, it’s axioms and its postulates. if you do you will find that it’s pretty much nonsense to assume much can be deduced from praxeological theory.

    From Rothbard:

    —-

    AXIOM

    “…praxeology contains one Fundamental Axiom–the axiom of action–which may be called a priori, and a few subsidiary postulates which are actually empirical.”

    POSTULATES

    (Postulate 1) A “…variety of resources, both natural and human. From this follows directly the division of labor, the market, etc.; ” (Believe it or not that is a direct quote.)

    (Postulate 2) Leisure is a consumer good.

    (Postulate 3) Indirect exchanges occur.

    (Postulate 4) Every firm aims always at maximizing its psychic profit; and this may or may not involve maximizing its money profit, and or also stated as everyone tries always to maximize his utility.

    —–

    b) If instead we say that it is possible for us to empirically determine the logical rules of cooperation, then praxeology is an empirical method of determining internally consistent rules (a logic of cooperation) for the purpose of testing statements of human cooperation for rationality.

    c) This logic, as empirically based, will allow the test of ANY **CONSTRUCTED** description of human cooperation. (Constructed means “articulated as a set of actions, which in science we refer to as ‘operational language’.)

    d) Therefore praxeology is, if completed (and it’s not complete) a formal logic of cooperation, that like mathematical logic or language-logic, can be used for the purpose of internally testing any argument for logical consistency.

    e) However, ‘true’ statements require BOTH internal consistency, and external correspondence. (I guess I will have to probably teach a few people the meaning of truth by making that statement.) Internal consistency is a PROOF, not a TRUTH. The test of a PROOF is external correspondence in addition to internal consistency. We use the term ‘true’ in the context of proof only to say ‘my attestation is true and therefore corresponds to my assertion’. But proofs are never true in themselves. They are merely proofs.

    f) The reasons that we may use the LOGIC of cooperation AS IF IT WERE A PRIORISTIC are i) that the perception of incentives as rational or not is marginally indifferent between human beings. ii) our rational perception of incentives is open to subjective testing – and therefore subjective testing of incentives is EMPIRICAL. iii) If our rational perception was marginally DIFFERENT, then we would neither be able to easily cooperate nor treat cooperation as IF it were a prioristic.

    g) However, this said, that still means that the logic of cooperation is EMPIRICAL. It just means that we do not have to rely on external instrumentation and logic to measure the rationality of any incentive. We need only reduce any economic statement to operational language, each step of which is open to the subjective test of rationality.

    h) There is very, very little that can be deduced from man acts. Praxeology is NOT deductive. It is a logic – a test of rational incentives independent of theft or involuntary transfer. But one cannot deduce ‘sticky prices’ from it. One can only deduce the incentives that produce sticky prices once one observes that prices are sticky.

    c) Mises pretty much abandons his position on apriorism at the end of his career. He has to because it’s pretty clear that he failed at developing a logic of cooperation. He failed because he tried to state it deductively rather than empirically.

    j) What we intuitively LIKE about the praxeological logic is that it EXPOSES MORAL AND IMMORAL transfers in exchanges.

    k) As such, praxeology is not ONLY a logic of cooperation – IT IS THE LOGIC OF MORAL ACTION. Period.

    I will continue to attempt to reform praxeology and get us out of the trap of German Continental and Jewish Cosmopolitan endemic conflation of moral, rational, and scientific statements, and attempt to complete the logic of human cooperation, over the next year, by converting it into anglo-empirical language like all other logics and sciences have been.

    However, if you understand the points above, and ponder them sufficiently, you will no longer need to operate under the Misesian pretense that praxeology is a science when it is a form of logic dependent upon empirical testing – dependent upon science.

    And you will help us rescue libertarian philosophy from the same silly traps that all continental philosophy has fallen into since Kant: the attempt to recreate christian obscurantist mysticism through the use of fuzzy language that conflates of moral, rational, and empirical statements into pseudoscience.

    We are no better than the ‘scientific socialists’ who propagated a pseudoscience obscured by and justified by the use of aggregates to hide systemic thefts.

    We are libertarians. We are supposed to be the smart people. We are supposed to be the people who understand economics – the study of human cooperation. Its about time we abandoned continental pseudoscience and relied upon empirical science.

    Right now the world thinks we all wear tinfoil hats. And when we argue such obviously false pretenses they’re right.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 09:26:00 UTC

  • PSEUDOSCIENCE AT ITS BEST (cross posted for archival purposes) From Rothbard. AX

    PSEUDOSCIENCE AT ITS BEST

    (cross posted for archival purposes)

    From Rothbard.

    AXIOM

    “…praxeology contains one Fundamental Axiom–the axiom of action–which may be called a priori, and a few subsidiary postulates which are actually empirical.”

    POSTULATES

    (Postulate 1) A “…variety of resources, both natural and human. From this follows directly the division of labor, the market, etc.; ” (Believe it or not that is a direct quote.)

    (Postulate 2) Leisure is a consumer good.

    (Postulate 3) Indirect exchanges occur.

    (Postulate 4) Every firm aims always at maximizing its psychic profit; and this may or may not involve maximizing its money profit, and or also stated as everyone tries always to maximize his utility.

    ASSERTIONS (completely meaningless)

    (a) that the fundamental axioms and premises of economics are absolutely true;

    (b) that the theorems and conclusions deduced by the laws of logic from these postulates are therefore absolutely true;

    (c) that there is consequently no need for empirical “testing,” either of the premises or the conclusions; and

    (d) that the deduced theorems could not be tested even if it were desirable.

    Both mises’ essay “Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science”, and Rothbards “Extreme Apriorism” are pseudoscientific arguments using the ‘Critique’ (obscurantism) developed over many centuries by jewish scholars. That is, to construct a hollow theory as a framework for criticism. The point is not to construct a theory that actually provides explanatory power, or is scientifically testable, but that casts doubt upon the opposing theory.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-26 09:24:00 UTC

  • THE ALTERNATIVE TO PSEUDOSCIENCE The natural state of man is to adapt his family

    THE ALTERNATIVE TO PSEUDOSCIENCE

    The natural state of man is to adapt his family (reproductive organization), and his rules of cooperation (property rights, norms, rituals and myths) to the continuous changes in the structure of production made possible by his technical advancements.

    There exists no natural state of man, only natural PROPERTIES of man. Two of those properties are the necessity of voluntary cooperation and the problem of free riding that emerges from it.

    Any cooperative organism must solve the problem as it evolves: creating incentives both in favor of production and against free riding and parasitism.

    Expansion of production in a division of knowledge and labor increases the opportunity for free riding and parasitism because of increasing anonymity of the participants the structure of production.

    Expansion of production requires increases in the complexity of the tools of cooperation: those that assist in transforming the imperceptible to analogy to experience, such that increasing complexity is open to calculation; and such that information distribution expands as well.

    Each major advancement in human cooperation has been achieved by increasing the information processing capacity of the population such that not only actions are open to voluntary coordination, but also such that free riding is increasingly suppressed.

    When we invented government we traded pervasive high transaction costs from violence fraud and deception, for systemic free riding and corruption. Thanks to Hoppe we know how to construct some necessary institutions that will make it more difficult to conduct free riding and corruption.

    But the answer ‘no government’ is actually admission of failure. It is still necessary for groups to coordinate their interests in a commons that produces beneficial common goods. Just as it is beneficial for shopping mall owners and market owners to produce investments that are beneficial to both vendors and customers as well as owners. Just as it is beneficial for all of us to construct norms that prohibit all forms of free riding, discounting, cheating and stealing.

    Competing government do not solve the problem of high local transaction costs. So the argument in favor of heterogeneous competing polities works if and only if there is some monarch that profits from all equally and polices all equally. (Which is where ROthbard and Mises got their ideas from: the ghetto.) For people to grand one another property rights voluntarily without a superior state or empire, they will require universally low transaction costs – at least locally. People demonstrate this everywhere and anywhere in history.

    So we are left with a large number of private monarchies as the compromise between the minimum homogeneity required, and the maximum size wherein a polity maintains a commonality of interest.

    At present, large city states with homogenous polities (the nordics) that are able to create reasonable amounts of liberty.. Even heavy redistribution is often tolerable to homogenous polities. Landed heterogeneous polities are notoriously intolerant of redistribution because it’s actually bad for the productive classes.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 13:29:00 UTC

  • SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE (good piece) While I’d have to ag

    SCIENTIFIC FAILURE VS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE

    (good piece)

    While I’d have to agree with Hoppe that Hayek didn’t focus enough on property rights, and did focus too much on psychology (like all good classical liberals), his study of the institutions of law are decidedly NOT pseudoscientific.

    Hayek’s work is hard to describe as failure, because it certainly was an improvement in intellectual history, even if he didn’t identify the causal properties of cooperation. But he did give us the arguments for necessity of the common law and the constitution.

    There is a very great difference between SCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Weber, Hayek, Kronecker, Poincaré, Brouwer and PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC FAILURE: Marx, Freud, Cantor, Russell, Keynes, Mises, Popper and Rothbard.

    What does it say about us that we don’t remember those scientific failures but we are attracted to pseudoscientific arguments like moths to the sociological flame?

    Is that because it is more comforting to rely upon the promise of the pseudoscientific and non falsifiable, than the promise of the scientific that is demonstrable as failure?

    A study of our history knowledge doesn’t tell us that. It tells us the opposite. That when we prove something is false that is when we know something that is true – that our idea was false. When we obtain new explanatory power we love to make use of it like a child with a new toy – rarely testing it. We love our pseudosciences.

    Hayek didn’t give us pseudoscience. Like Newton he was accurate but imprecise.

    Curt Doolittle

    Kiev.

    — notes for later —

    Weber was right that the advancement of civilization requires multiple special disciplines of ‘calculation’ such that

    Mises was right that a fundamental problem was economic calculation.

    Hayek was right that a fundamental problem is information.

    Hayek was right that simple rules are necessary

    Hayek was right that the common law and the constitution are required rules and rule systems.

    Rothbard I think was just plain wrong outside of his history.

    Hoppe was right as far as he took his arguments – which was pretty far. (Although I really wish he’d give up on argumentation.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 13:28:00 UTC

  • MISES WAS JUST WRONG : APRIORI VS FALSIFICATION Mises was a victim of the Jewish

    MISES WAS JUST WRONG : APRIORI VS FALSIFICATION

    Mises was a victim of the Jewish enlightenment (just as Hayek suggested) and could not escape pseudoscientific text and verbalism endemic to Jewish culture. He failed to give us the logic he ‘sensed’ that describes human action by attempting to suggest that, like jewish fanaticism, it was possible to conduct deduction from first principles. It is not.

    It is however possible for all humans to TEST statements reduced to some analogy to experience by way of logics or instrumentation. This “universal-ness”: the marginal indifference in human incentives – is the source of logic: reduction to perception.

    So we can either reform praxeology by correcting it through inversion from a form of deduction to an empirical method of testing the rationality of incentives, or we can discard praxeology as a failed attempt at creating logic of cooperation that underlies all economic activity.

    My preference is to give Mises credit by REFORMING praxeology, which would have the benefit of undermining the remaining body of pseudoscientific libertarian dogma that, because it is actually immoral in content, HINDERS the progress of liberty by providing the same false hope that ALL scriptural pseudo rational, pseudoscientific methods of inquiry do. We must remember that ratio-scientific investigation, meritocratic evolution norms, meritocratic evolution of common laws, and meritocratic circulation of elites, are slow and expensive methods of change. And that pseudoscience and pseudo-rational arguments are simply attempts to obtain some end at a discount on the expenditure of effort necessary to achieve that end empirically (by empirically, I mean “demonstrably”).

    I would also prefer to discredit all of Rothbard’s pseudoscientific ghetto pseudo scientific while preserving his historical contributions to the history of fiat money and credit. His critique of the State, as that of Mises’ is a significant contribution to the criticism of political thought. However neither Mises nor Rothbard contributed what did Hoppe: a solution to the problem of formal institutions. The three men, Mises, rothbard and Hoppe, did manage to give us our first attempt at the formal logic of cooperation. Albeit, like all Continentals they failed to provide it in anglo-empirical and therefore scientific terms.

    So my preference is to reform libertarianism and give credit to their contributions – contributions I have obviously made use of.

    And that is my objective.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 09:44:00 UTC

  • RATIONALISM AND THE APRIOR AS FAILURES IN CONTRAST TO NATURAL SCIENCE – ALWAYS A

    RATIONALISM AND THE APRIOR AS FAILURES IN CONTRAST TO NATURAL SCIENCE – ALWAYS AND FOREVER WILL BE

    –“Newton’s work stands as the great exemplar of the accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, the most salient contrast between Newton’s work and that of the great rationalist systems lies in their methods.”

    “Whereas the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first principles, known a priori, Newton’s method begins with the observed phenomena of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be derived or explained.”

    **”The contrast between the great success of Newton’s “bottom-up” procedure and the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.”**–

    From SEP : By Mark Alznauer, Margaret Atherton, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Alan Nelson, Julius Sensat and Rachel Zuckert provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, which lead to substantial revisions.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-25 09:28:00 UTC

  • VANITY AND INTELLIGENCE IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES –“[Physical] scientists are ov

    VANITY AND INTELLIGENCE IN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES

    –“[Physical] scientists are overwhelmingly atheist,” Dutton said. “This is predicted by their high IQ, which allows you to rise above emotion and see through the fallacious, emotional arguments.” Arguments about God are all emotional arguments, he added.”–

    I would argue, successfully I think; first, that intelligence forces a discount on the value and utility of the opinions of others.

    And second, that learning the contrarian displacement of mythos with reason and science grants one significant status signals in life.

    Unfortunately, it appears to be endemic, that very smart people rarely grasp that the dependence of the lesser intelligent, upon the opinions of others, is necessary for their ability to act by their own discretion.

    Nor do they grasp that these lesser minds cannot tell the difference between one set of snake oil salesmen and another.

    Nor do they grasp the pedagogical necessity of teaching the young through experiential analogy first – myth, and instrumental necessity second – science. And for many the instrumental – both logical and physical – is simply either unnecessary or irrelevant.

    For the average person, reliance upon the traditional and ‘time tested’ is simply THE MOST SCIENTIFIC AND RATIONAL COURSE OF ACTION available to them.

    I’m not uncomfortable stating that I discount the value of the opinions of others, and that I happily revel in the status signals that come with demonstrating one’s intelligence

    But I never make the erroneous assumption that myths and traditions and even superstitions, while ARATIONAL are irrational. They are not.

    And until each individual can experience an alternative that is superior to his myths and traditions, and the opinions of others, it is irrational to ask them to value, agree with, and adopt, what they cannot understand.

    Because if they cannot grasp it, then we are asking them to act upon FAITH in us. Rather than faith in the accumulated wisdom of centuries.

    It is a peculiar vanity of the intelligent to claim that they are the gods we should listen to.

    Myself included.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-18 05:58:00 UTC