Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • (PERSONAL NOTE) First sketch: Contra Quine. The Physical Universe Observation (m

    (PERSONAL NOTE)

    First sketch:

    Contra Quine.

    The Physical Universe

    Observation (memory)

    Descriptive language

    The Scientific Method

    Measurement

    Mathematics

    Logic.

    Each of these is related to the one before it.

    Each loses information over the one before it.

    Rather than this hierarchy, they can be arranged on multiple axis describing various relations between them.

    But in every set of relations, information loss remains.

    Calculation in the broadest sense is impossible without information loss.

    The reason Popper’s CR is attractive is that it is a theory of action.

    It compensates for a cognitive bias all humans possess, which is that sense, perception, memory, and ‘calculation’ theorizing and planning are of necessity inductive processes, because we are always working against a kaleidic future whose state we can only approximate.

    Humans evolved to act with little information.

    When we extended our sense perception (observability) first with language and the narrative, we developed argument in the loosest terms. Second with quantitative measurements, we developed mathematics to work with objects whose scale was beyond our perception. Third we developed what we now call pure or symbolic logic to work with sets instead of quantities.

    But each of these systems launders information.

    Furthermore, we are confused by physics and fortunately countered by economics, because while the categories that we measure in the physical universe equilibrate, and we believed economies equilibrated because of prices. But it turns out, that because of flocking and schooling by induction-driven humans, that economies actually drive to disequilibrium, where they crash and people reorganize. Many small reorganizations are easy to absorb, and very large are not. ( Housing, Plague, trade routes, war. )

    There is a vast difference between symbolic logic and the logic of action for similar reasons of information loss.

    And this is the problem with both how popper argued in favor of CR in his era, and how Quine et all’s criticism is false.

    It is that the physical sciences snd the symbolic languages of logic and mathematics refer to constant categories that mirror the properties of the physical universe because ratios equilibrate in a manner identical to the physical universe wherever that universe exists independent of human action.

    But since humans act with limited information, their actions are fraught with error. In their inductions, in their, theories, in their actions and in their observations.

    The difference between poppers CR and Quine’s formal logic is that popper is inarticulately trying to give us direction given that we have made many errors of inclusion, exclusion and calculation in articulating a theory whatever its form, but our error is an error in the selection of information not an error in reasoning.

    Quines errors are many but I think they can be summed up as confusing an error in reasoning with errors of measurement, by confusing the content of statements with the categories that they are symbols of, because the simplistic set theory he is working with correlates highly with the physical universe because that universe equilibrates to a natural state, while the human race faces the unique challenge of creating disequilibria in the physical universe so that we can capture the energy available in the difference.

    I have always viewed formal logic as a tautological victorian parlor game.

    Someone smarter than i am will have to take on the burden of creating a smbolic logic of action in disequilibrium. But i suspect that we already have it, in the scientific method and that the attempts to conjoin formal logic of certainty and the critical rationalism in science are operationally distinct fields.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-14 08:12:00 UTC

  • THE HOLES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT WILL KILL OFF POSTMODERNISM? (Quote:) “Showing th

    http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983258406/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkFILLING THE HOLES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT WILL KILL OFF POSTMODERNISM?

    (Quote:)

    “Showing that a [Postmodernism] leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be dangerous.

    “Tracing postmodernism’s roots back to Rousseau, Kant, and Marx explains how all of its elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not refute postmodernism. What is still needed is a refutation of those historical premises, and an identification and defense of the alternatives to them.

    “The Enlightenment was based on premises opposite to those of postmodernism, but while the Enlightenment was able to create a magnificent world on the basis of those premises, it articulated and defended them only incompletely. That weakness is the sole source of postmodernism’s power against it.

    “Completing the articulation and defense of those premises is therefore essential to maintaining the forward progress of the Enlightenment vision and shielding it against postmodern strategies.”

    (FROM: Hicks, Stephen R. C. – Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault)

    COMMENT

    This is the last page of Stephen Hicks’ exceptionally accessible work on Postmodernism.

    But for those in the Dark Enlightenment, and for those of us trying to articulate why the western social model produced the high trust society, and how we can preserve that high trust society against both the state and the errors of the enlightenment vision, that task is much harder than it sounds.

    The reason being that we are not as marginally indifferent as the enlightenment philosophers argued. We are not separated by will and resource, but we are separated by ability, necessity, and preference, and that separation is irreconciliable with the institutions that the classical liberals gave us as an inheritance. We are saddled with multiple conflicts, and a rapidly diverging set of cultures, under an imperial bureaucracy, that is so well funded it is impossible to break, but equally impossible to use to cooperate.

    Some of us are trying to develop institutions that will allow heterogeneous peoples with conflicting moral codes to cooperate as peacefully in the production of commons as they do in the market.

    But the Postmodern vision is to empower tyranny in pursuit of a homogenous equalitarian utopia. which for the top and bottom may be attractive. But for the rest it is a net loss in all that we can desire, hope for and imagine.

    SKEPTICISM

    I am skeptical that it is at all possible to repair classical liberal institutions under representative majority rule. That system was invented to secure and hold power. But the question is, who will hold that power, and what will they do with it.

    That is even more frightening than another dark age created by yet another version of an irrational religion.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-13 06:50:00 UTC

  • The Incentives of Scientists And Philosophers: A Virtuous Competition For Status

    [E]conomic reasoning would argue that people follow incentives. The incentives of scientists are to prosecute an idea regardless of its merit. Science does not progress because scientists are self aware, or because they employ rational criticism and judgement. (Although I think this criticism applies to the 90% at the bottom more so than the 10% at the top.) Science advances because either another’s career advance is obtained by discrediting an existing idea, or because its author dies and can no longer defend it from, or adapt it to, criticism. For these reasons, requesting that scientists demonstrate “understanding” of the philosophy of science is overrated – unless incentives exist to enforce that understanding. Since it is not in a scientist’s interest to use critical rationalism, it is very hard to imagine they will. [P]hilosophers are primarily cops: critics and articulators of what we humans say and do but do not fully understand. And honestly we are rarely inventors. And we function as critics of scientists, since it is in our interests to obtain status by criticizing scientists. A scientist collects data and forms hypotheses. We collect arguments in support of hypotheses and criticize those arguments. That is our incentive: it is our specialization. Not data collection: criticism. But it is patently irrational to expect scientists alone to demontrate behaviors counter to their incentives. It’s a division of knowledge and labor in real time. And we are supposed to be the rational ones after all.

  • NOTES ON THE LIBERTARIAN REFORMATION 1) Our generation’s challenge is not social

    NOTES ON THE LIBERTARIAN REFORMATION

    1) Our generation’s challenge is not socialism, it’s the state religion of anti-scientific, contra-rational postmodernism. (The religion of progressivism.) The dogma, literature, and ideological bias of the libertarian movement is a generation behind.

    2) Government per se, is not a ‘bad’. What’s ‘bad’ are the corporeal state, monopoly, bureaucracy, majority rule, and legislative law. When we fail to make this distinction we are in fact, ‘wrong’. A government that consists of a monopolistically articulated set of property rights and the terms of dispute resolution, operating under the common law, and a group of people whose purpose is to facilitate investments in the commons by voluntary contract, but who cannot make legislative law, is in fact, a government. It may not be necessary government among people with homogenous preferences and beliefs. But it is somewhere between necessary and beneficial government for people with heterogeneous preferences and beliefs. It is however, not a bad government.

    3) Property is unnatural to man. Tribal human settlement is matrilineal, egalitarian, malthusian and poor. Mate selection is determined by sexual favors within the group, and raiding, capturing and killing for women outside the group whenever there was a shortage of women.

    4) Property rights and paternalism were an innovation made possible by the domestication of animals and the ability of males to accumulate wealth outside of the matrilineal order. Property rather than sexual favors was such an advantage that it inverted the relationship between the sexes and determined mate selection. (The feminists are correct.)

    5) Property rights were created by a minority who granted equality of property rights to one another in exchange for service in warfare. The source of property rights is the organized application of violence to create those property rights. Because property rights are the desire of the minority. However, property rights created such an increase in prosperity and consumption that others sought to join the ranks of property owners.

    6) The redistributive state that was voted into power by women, has reversed the innovation of private property and in concert with feminists, is eroding the nuclear family, and the male ability to collect property. The institutions of marriage, nuclear family, and private property cannot survive when a democratic majority can deprive men of private property rights, and their ability to control mating and reproduction.

    7 ) Rothbardian Libertarian ethics are ‘insufficient’. The high trust society forbids involuntary transfers by externality and asymmetry of information, and enforces this demand with a requirement for warranty. The ethics of the high trust society forbid all involuntary transfers except through competition in the market.

    8 ) Rothbardian ethics are wrong (and bad): The market incentives alone are not high enough to overcome corruption, and create the high trust society without additional moral prohibitions: norms are a commons. They are property. Conservatives are right.

    9 ) Libertarians do not exist in sufficient numbers. And it is not possible to enfranchise the conservatives (classical liberals) with Rothbardian ‘ghetto’ ethics. Without conservatives, who have a broader set of moral biases, the libertarian bias is morally objectionable to too large a population, and libertarians are too small in number to accumulate and hold the power necessary to determine property rights in a geography. It’s important to understand that rothbardian ethics are ‘wrong’ because they are insufficient.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 08:07:00 UTC

  • THE INCENTIVES OF SCIENTISTS Economics would argue that people follow incentives

    THE INCENTIVES OF SCIENTISTS

    Economics would argue that people follow incentives.

    The incentives of scientists are to prosecute your idea regardless of its merit.

    Science does not progress because scientists are self aware, or because they employ rational criticism and judgement. (Although I think this criticism applies to the 80% at the bottom more so than the 20% at the top.)

    Science advances because either another’s career advance is obtained by discrediting an existing idea, or because its author dies and can no longer defend it from criticism.

    For these reasons, “understanding” is overrated unless incentives exist to enforce that understanding.

    Since it is not in anyones interest to be critically rational it is very hard to imagine they will be.

    Philosophers are primarily cops, critics and articulators of what we do but do not understand – and rarely inventors. And we function as critics of scientists, since it is in our interests to obtain status by criticizing scientists.

    But it is patently irrational to expect scientists alone to demontrate behaviors counter to their incentives.

    And we are supposed to be the rational ones after all.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:28:00 UTC

  • WORLD EVENTS ARE LUMPY. Planning is so much easier when we think the universe is

    WORLD EVENTS ARE LUMPY.

    Planning is so much easier when we think the universe is even and predictable. But we tend to confuse our desire for and search for regularity, with the fact that the universe, and the human actions within that universe, are unpredictable, lumpy and our lives fragile.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-07 11:04:00 UTC

  • IN EDUCATION The percentage of people smart enough to work in science, technolog

    http://m.nber.org/papers/w19165.pdfFALLACY IN EDUCATION

    The percentage of people smart enough to work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is small and a function of genetic distributions.

    The fields can each compete with each other for that pool of students. But the size of that pool cannot be increased without demographic changes.

    Further, many smart people can be attracted by lucrative positions in law, finance, and commerce where individual achievement captures higher rewards, and where the individual has more control over the career cycle needed to capture those rewards.

    You cannot prepare someone for a career in the STEM classes unless he or she has the ability for doing the work.

    Our school systems are far more concerned about instilling undue confidence in children, and setting the stage for future disappointment, civil unrest, and economic uncompetitiveness than they are preparing children to be successful in the work force.

    American children have the highest confidence in the world but that confidence is demonstrably unwarranted.

    That this problem is the result of forced racial integration and the challenge this put in our educational system snd its culture is no so commonly understood.

    But any lie must be compounded with more lies to hide the original, and this is the result.

    The Finnish a german midels must be adopted at some near future point. Otherwise we shoukd just go back to teaching mysticism – which is about as sensible as what we currently do.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-02 06:52:00 UTC

  • The Purpose Of Philosophy: in the Analytic, Naturalistic Philosophy of Action

    [T]he purpose of enlightenment program was isolate thought, morality and politics from the superstition of Magian religion. It was to launder superstition in favor of empirical reasoning in The analytic program’s objective was to incorporate the physical sciences into philosophy, but to hold onto the metaphysical program. The naturalistic, praxeological (action) and economic programs are attempting to launder the metaphysical program from philosophy. (Or that’s close enough for our purposes here.)

      [T]he assumption in this line of reasoning, this set of priorities, is that with more knowledge we have more choices to determine how to make ourselves most happy through the accumulation of experiences. The other line of reasoning, is that human beings are able at present to be happy if they seek to obtain The problem is that humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption provided by the first, and demonstrate a preference to expend the intellectual and physical labor of the second. More accurately: they want others to expend the effort on the first, and to reserve for themselves the experiences of the second. We call conflict of ambitions a desire for ‘free riding’. In fact, we can argue that more human calculation is performed for the purpose of pursuing free riding than any other end except sex. Curt Doolittle. Kiev, Ukraine. (NOTE 1: “Calculation, in its broadest sense, refers to any comparison that permits a judgement. So while numeric computation is included in the definition of calculation, but so is ‘Where can I get a peanut butter sandwich?’ and ‘Do I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream more today?’. We use ‘calculation’ to distinguish simplistic processes from reasoning, which has a higher standard of demands – namely substitution and transformation.) (NOTE 2: This approach abandons the metaphysical program.)

    • The Purpose Of Philosophy: in the Analytic, Naturalistic Philosophy of Action

      [T]he purpose of enlightenment program was isolate thought, morality and politics from the superstition of Magian religion. It was to launder superstition in favor of empirical reasoning in The analytic program’s objective was to incorporate the physical sciences into philosophy, but to hold onto the metaphysical program. The naturalistic, praxeological (action) and economic programs are attempting to launder the metaphysical program from philosophy. (Or that’s close enough for our purposes here.)

        [T]he assumption in this line of reasoning, this set of priorities, is that with more knowledge we have more choices to determine how to make ourselves most happy through the accumulation of experiences. The other line of reasoning, is that human beings are able at present to be happy if they seek to obtain The problem is that humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption provided by the first, and demonstrate a preference to expend the intellectual and physical labor of the second. More accurately: they want others to expend the effort on the first, and to reserve for themselves the experiences of the second. We call conflict of ambitions a desire for ‘free riding’. In fact, we can argue that more human calculation is performed for the purpose of pursuing free riding than any other end except sex. Curt Doolittle. Kiev, Ukraine. (NOTE 1: “Calculation, in its broadest sense, refers to any comparison that permits a judgement. So while numeric computation is included in the definition of calculation, but so is ‘Where can I get a peanut butter sandwich?’ and ‘Do I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream more today?’. We use ‘calculation’ to distinguish simplistic processes from reasoning, which has a higher standard of demands – namely substitution and transformation.) (NOTE 2: This approach abandons the metaphysical program.)

      • WITH GRAPHS – BY A GROWNUP

        http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/26/noticeable-climate-change/CLIMATE – WITH GRAPHS – BY A GROWNUP

        Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 11:06:00 UTC