Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • The NYT: A New Name For Philosophy? Branding Wont Solve The Problem. Propertarianism Might.

    via Philosophy by Another Name – NYTimes.com.

    I would like to launch the Campaign for Renaming Philosophy (C.R.P.) — or perhaps more accurately, the Campaign for Renaming Academic Philosophy (which has a less attractive abbreviation). I suggest meeting with other philosophers informally to discuss the question and forming small groups of people dedicated to the cause. If you are on board, start using the new terminology among yourselves, just to get accustomed to it. It might then be brought up in a department meeting, and a vote taken as to the merits of the case.

    Leif Parsons

    It won’t be easy to change our name. We have more than 2000 years of linguistic usage bearing down on us. There will be resistance. But keep in mind that scientists changed their “philosophy” name too, no doubt against entrenched opposition; even today the heads of some physics departments are still described as chairs of “natural philosophy.” But that was a necessary and sound decision.

    Perhaps in 100 years’ time the process will be complete and our universities will all have a “department of ontics.” Don’t you want to be part of this historical movement? I believe that once the matter is seen clearly the eventual renaming will be well nigh inevitable.

    Are the humanities a set of tools for the analysis and perpetuation of norms? I think so. Answering that question will provide an answer to the future of philosophy. The problem the discipline faces is that it has failed to produce an internally consistent framework for the discussion of norms for the post agrarian era. The economists have failed, the political philosophers have failed. Philosophers m@sturb@ted for more than half a century on the metaphysical and linguistic programs. Incorporating the clarity of the sciences, and sometimes the data, but clinging with every fiber of their conscious minds, to the concept of community inherent in christian and jewish theology. Humanity needs a series of norms that are a solution to modernity. It needs institutions that they can understand as assisting the the production of those norms. THey need a way of rationalizing those norms so that they can act. But philosophy is at its heart, mystical and antique. And humanity has suffered for it. And I suspect, as someone who tries to solve this problem myself, that it is because the antique norms within us — the very civic virtues that made philosophy exist as a discipline, — must be deconstructed and replaced with something new. Rorty and his like use the word ‘post-philosophy’. But I don’t think the name matters. Either the field solves a material problem, and it incorporates the physical sciences, and adopts a teleological framework that allows it to fully abandon its agrarian normative past, or it will continue to be irrelevant. And the norms that exist within the humanities, unless they are given a framework for the new era, are just as irrelevant. The western humanities are appeals for power by the middle class. Now that they have power, what will they do with it? There are no answers in that tradition. We need something new. Of course, I think it’s Propertarianism. But then, I’m shooting in the dark like everyone else.

  • The NYT: A New Name For Philosophy? Branding Wont Solve The Problem. Propertarianism Might.

    via Philosophy by Another Name – NYTimes.com.

    I would like to launch the Campaign for Renaming Philosophy (C.R.P.) — or perhaps more accurately, the Campaign for Renaming Academic Philosophy (which has a less attractive abbreviation). I suggest meeting with other philosophers informally to discuss the question and forming small groups of people dedicated to the cause. If you are on board, start using the new terminology among yourselves, just to get accustomed to it. It might then be brought up in a department meeting, and a vote taken as to the merits of the case.

    Leif Parsons

    It won’t be easy to change our name. We have more than 2000 years of linguistic usage bearing down on us. There will be resistance. But keep in mind that scientists changed their “philosophy” name too, no doubt against entrenched opposition; even today the heads of some physics departments are still described as chairs of “natural philosophy.” But that was a necessary and sound decision.

    Perhaps in 100 years’ time the process will be complete and our universities will all have a “department of ontics.” Don’t you want to be part of this historical movement? I believe that once the matter is seen clearly the eventual renaming will be well nigh inevitable.

    Are the humanities a set of tools for the analysis and perpetuation of norms? I think so. Answering that question will provide an answer to the future of philosophy. The problem the discipline faces is that it has failed to produce an internally consistent framework for the discussion of norms for the post agrarian era. The economists have failed, the political philosophers have failed. Philosophers m@sturb@ted for more than half a century on the metaphysical and linguistic programs. Incorporating the clarity of the sciences, and sometimes the data, but clinging with every fiber of their conscious minds, to the concept of community inherent in christian and jewish theology. Humanity needs a series of norms that are a solution to modernity. It needs institutions that they can understand as assisting the the production of those norms. THey need a way of rationalizing those norms so that they can act. But philosophy is at its heart, mystical and antique. And humanity has suffered for it. And I suspect, as someone who tries to solve this problem myself, that it is because the antique norms within us — the very civic virtues that made philosophy exist as a discipline, — must be deconstructed and replaced with something new. Rorty and his like use the word ‘post-philosophy’. But I don’t think the name matters. Either the field solves a material problem, and it incorporates the physical sciences, and adopts a teleological framework that allows it to fully abandon its agrarian normative past, or it will continue to be irrelevant. And the norms that exist within the humanities, unless they are given a framework for the new era, are just as irrelevant. The western humanities are appeals for power by the middle class. Now that they have power, what will they do with it? There are no answers in that tradition. We need something new. Of course, I think it’s Propertarianism. But then, I’m shooting in the dark like everyone else.

  • Why Doesn’t Philosophy Get Respect?

    Science consists of a network of externally testable hypotheses.Scientific statements are testable because the physical universe is internally consistent, and because of that consistency, subject to fixed categories that are reducible to numbers which can be manipulated by the process of ratios we call mathematics.

    As such, the physical universe is extremely simple compared to the conceptual universe. In the conceptual universe, the entire purpose of philosophy is to construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct plastic categories for the purpose of determining actions, so that we may establish cooperative norms, for human beings existing within that material universe consisting of pervasive but reducible material scarcity caused by the permanent scarcity of time. The purpose of thought its action, and the purpose of action is to outwit and therefore alter, the current course of events so that we may consume the difference within the time frames necessary to perpetuate our survival.

    Philosophy consists of a series of traditions which attempt to solve the conflict of our desire for perpetuating our norms — no matter how ludicrous they may be — while allowing us to adapt to changes in our material world. It took until Aristototle to develop reason as we understand it. We were infected by Persian and Abrahamic Mysticism, and only began to crawl out of it during the reformation and enlightenment. Philosophy undermined theology as the middle class undermined the landed aristocracy. Darwin cut both the magian tradition as well as the rules that our norms were based upon. Most philosophy is not testable. Much of it is terribly bad. Too much of it ignores the data from the physical sciences. Most remains introspective as a means of avoiding the data from the physical sciences. Although, the analytic program has in some reductio way, attempted to solve the problem of making testable statements, and incorporating data from the physical sciences, the discipilne was infected by pervasive religious derivatives and attempted to solve the metaphyisical problem as a way of regaining its prestige lost to the hard sciences. Philosophy struggled to remain relevant. The post analytics finally abandoned mysticism altogether. Some post analytical philosophers call their discipline “Post Philosophy” to openly and finally fully abandon philosophy’s magian ancestry. Meanwhile the sociologists and the economists tried to solve most of the problems of the social sciences through positivism but failed. And both the philosophers and the mystics have continued to fail — because we still hold our desperately to our agrarian norms and categories.

    Philosophy today is a form of fitness that allows one to not fall prey to the limited methodology of another technical discipline. As a discipline itself it has failed to solve the material problems of creating an internally consistent set of categories and relations that will assist us in the development of new norms without at the same time perishing because of our hubris. One cannot study economics, history, sociology, politics and philosophy as an integrated program. One must either choose an empirical course of study, or choose a narrative course of study. Until philosophy unites these fields, it will remain irrelevant. And synthesis is what we need of it.

    There is still room for philosophy precisely because all the disciplines have failed to produce a conceptual framework for adapting to modernity. But philosophy is as much a prisoner of its traditions as it benefits from them. And academic philosophy, mired in the error of the analytic program’s pursuit of the metaphysical problem has been, and simply perpetuates an error that renders the discipline ineffective and deprives society of answers to pressing problems of anonymity and insensitivity created by a division of knowledge and labor that yields an inverse relationship between material comforts and psychological comforts.

    Mankind suffers for their folly.

  • Why Doesn’t Philosophy Get Respect?

    Science consists of a network of externally testable hypotheses.Scientific statements are testable because the physical universe is internally consistent, and because of that consistency, subject to fixed categories that are reducible to numbers which can be manipulated by the process of ratios we call mathematics.

    As such, the physical universe is extremely simple compared to the conceptual universe. In the conceptual universe, the entire purpose of philosophy is to construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct plastic categories for the purpose of determining actions, so that we may establish cooperative norms, for human beings existing within that material universe consisting of pervasive but reducible material scarcity caused by the permanent scarcity of time. The purpose of thought its action, and the purpose of action is to outwit and therefore alter, the current course of events so that we may consume the difference within the time frames necessary to perpetuate our survival.

    Philosophy consists of a series of traditions which attempt to solve the conflict of our desire for perpetuating our norms — no matter how ludicrous they may be — while allowing us to adapt to changes in our material world. It took until Aristototle to develop reason as we understand it. We were infected by Persian and Abrahamic Mysticism, and only began to crawl out of it during the reformation and enlightenment. Philosophy undermined theology as the middle class undermined the landed aristocracy. Darwin cut both the magian tradition as well as the rules that our norms were based upon. Most philosophy is not testable. Much of it is terribly bad. Too much of it ignores the data from the physical sciences. Most remains introspective as a means of avoiding the data from the physical sciences. Although, the analytic program has in some reductio way, attempted to solve the problem of making testable statements, and incorporating data from the physical sciences, the discipilne was infected by pervasive religious derivatives and attempted to solve the metaphyisical problem as a way of regaining its prestige lost to the hard sciences. Philosophy struggled to remain relevant. The post analytics finally abandoned mysticism altogether. Some post analytical philosophers call their discipline “Post Philosophy” to openly and finally fully abandon philosophy’s magian ancestry. Meanwhile the sociologists and the economists tried to solve most of the problems of the social sciences through positivism but failed. And both the philosophers and the mystics have continued to fail — because we still hold our desperately to our agrarian norms and categories.

    Philosophy today is a form of fitness that allows one to not fall prey to the limited methodology of another technical discipline. As a discipline itself it has failed to solve the material problems of creating an internally consistent set of categories and relations that will assist us in the development of new norms without at the same time perishing because of our hubris. One cannot study economics, history, sociology, politics and philosophy as an integrated program. One must either choose an empirical course of study, or choose a narrative course of study. Until philosophy unites these fields, it will remain irrelevant. And synthesis is what we need of it.

    There is still room for philosophy precisely because all the disciplines have failed to produce a conceptual framework for adapting to modernity. But philosophy is as much a prisoner of its traditions as it benefits from them. And academic philosophy, mired in the error of the analytic program’s pursuit of the metaphysical problem has been, and simply perpetuates an error that renders the discipline ineffective and deprives society of answers to pressing problems of anonymity and insensitivity created by a division of knowledge and labor that yields an inverse relationship between material comforts and psychological comforts.

    Mankind suffers for their folly.

  • WATCH: From RonT: “You keep touting IS-LM. Keynes didn’t endorse IS-LM, its crea

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/economic-models-and-economic-predictions/KRUGMAN WATCH:

    From RonT: “You keep touting IS-LM. Keynes didn’t endorse IS-LM, its creator Hicks repudiated it later in life. Since 1971 when Nixon ditched the gold standard IS-LM was without any theoretical justification whatsoever, there is no market for loanable funds. Banks create deposits out of nothing against the borrower’s IOU, so investment creates its own savings. Loanable funds is a fairy tale of a primitive economy without banks.

    Your predictions for low interest rates in this crisis were right by pure accident – the interest rate in modern economy is not set by the market, but by the monopoly supplier of reserve balances, the Fed. The Fed lets the market toy with long-term interest rates, but it could fix them at any level by the same procedure it uses to fix the short rate: QE and “the operation twist” are the proof. So if the Fed changed its mind and raised rates, your “prediction” would simply turn out wrong. The Fed and not the market for loanable funds determines the interest rate, period.”

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/philip-pilkington-the-liquidity-trap-and-all-that%E2%80%A6.html

    Source date (UTC): 2012-03-03 21:50:00 UTC

  • An Example Of Scientistic Hubris In Economics

    “Ben Bernanke has said that he could not save Lehman because it would be have been in violation of the law. My response is that it is not his responsibility to enforce the law. It is his responsibility to safe guard the lives of millions of people. … When the Capitol Police haul him away in chains then his responsibility to prevent the Great Recession ends. Until that moment the choice not to act, is his choice alone. … The constitution is no shield.” – Karl Smith, Modled Behavior

    Thus begins all violent ends. Government consists of institutions. People have the institutions that they choose to. People deserve the consequences of those institutions. They learn from those consequences. People choose or choose not to alter institutions to prevent repeats of the past. People deserve the consequences of choosing or not choosing to alter those institutions. Political externalities are so vast, economic consequences are a trifle by comparison. Politics is the exercise of power. Power is the ability to alter the probability of outcomes. It is the ability to transfer, or deny the transfer, of opportunities and rewards between groups. Let’s see what this economist has done: 1- The scientistic fallacy. 2 -The fallacy of goodwill. 3- The false consensus bias. 4-Fallacy of collective terms. 5-The denial of externalities. 6- The fallacy of the short run. So he errs. And in that error would open the door to far greater horrors than the one we suffer now. The west is unique: it is the only social order that employs the competition between organizations with competing interests who must enact rules which are used by ordinary people who run institutions to conduct the affairs of the polis. It is a ‘game’ form of government for a ‘game’ marketplace. It is the only instance of that model to survive. and as a consequence it breaks the consanguineous bonds that determine the fate of all other civilizations. So, Fix the laws. The rule of law is all we have. Without it, we cannot have a high trust society, and would quickly devolve into either india or south america. Politics is more complex than economics. Political externalities have greater consequences than economic externalities. And Scientistic hubris is legion.

  • AN EXAMPLE OF SCIENTISTIC HUBRIS IN ECONOMICS “Ben Bernanke has said that he cou

    AN EXAMPLE OF SCIENTISTIC HUBRIS IN ECONOMICS

    “Ben Bernanke has said that he could not save Lehman because it would be have been in violation of the law. My response is that it is not his responsibility to enforce the law. It is his responsibility to safe guard the lives of millions of people. … When the Capitol Police haul him away in chains then his responsibility to prevent the Great Recession ends. Until that moment the choice not to act, is his choice alone. … The constitution is no shield.” – Karl Smith, Modled Behavior

    Thus begins all violent ends.

    Government consists of institutions. People have the institutions that they choose to. People deserve the consequences of those institutions. They learn from those consequences. People choose or choose not to alter institutions to prevent repeats of the past. People deserve the consequences of choosing or not choosing to alter those institutions. Political externalities are so vast, economic consequences are a trifle by comparison.

    Politics is the exercise of power. Power is the ability to alter the probability of outcomes. It is the ability to transfer, or deny the transfer, of opportunities and rewards between groups.

    Let’s see what this economist has done: 1- The scientistic fallacy. 2 -The fallacy of goodwill. 3- The false consensus bias. 4-Fallacy of collective terms. 5-The denial of externalities. 6- The fallacy of the short run.

    So he errs. And in that error would open the door to far greater horrors than the one we suffer now.

    The west is unique: it is the only social order that employs the competition between organizations with competing interests who must enact rules which are used by ordinary people who run institutions to conduct the affairs of the polis. It is a ‘game’ form of government for a ‘game’ marketplace. It is the only instance of that model to survive. and as a consequence it breaks the consanguineous bonds that determine the fate of all other civilizations.

    So, Fix the laws. The rule of law is all we have. Without it, we cannot have a high trust society, and would quickly devolve into either india or south america.

    Politics is more complex than economics. Political externalities have greater consequences than economic externalities.

    And Scientistic hubris is legion.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-02-23 10:34:00 UTC

  • DANGER OF EXCLUSIVITY IN ECONOMETRICS Economists, like all methodologists, extra

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/01/how-to-save-economics.htmlTHE DANGER OF EXCLUSIVITY IN ECONOMETRICS

    Economists, like all methodologists, extrapolate the conclusions they draw from their methods beyond the scope of their methods. (See Kahneman.)

    Psychologists place extraordinary emphasis on the meaning of emotional stimuli, rather than the outcomes that would be achieved by training emotions to favor more beneficial outcomes in the material world. Cognitive psychologists reverse this preference.

    Liberals extrapolate their bias for nesting and care-taking, and their preference for consensus, to the ability of humans to plan, and cooperate on the scale of a state or economy.

    We are all prisoners of our methods and biases, and our only the mastery of the methods of multiple fields of inquiry makes us critical enough of our abilities.

    The Austrians are largely correct in their analysis of micro, as well as the impact of modern macro. We do not really know if the various permutations of MMT will work or not. But it is abundantly clear that modern macro applies only to small homogenous societies. And in diverse heterogeneous societies, micro and social behaviors are more influential than the power of monetary and fiscal policy to compete with.

    Humans act consistently over time. Humas vary greatly. And the less on of the greeks, and the mandate in western aristocratic tradition, is the ever present and inescapable frailty of human reasoning, and the consequential warning against human hubris, the only solution to which is competition and the balance of power demonstrated by commercial and military success.

    In other words – actions are scientific and theories are not.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-25 11:48:00 UTC

  • DO WE HAVE CHINS? An Interesting question by the Smithsonian

    http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/01/why-do-humans-have-chins/WHY DO WE HAVE CHINS? An Interesting question by the Smithsonian.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-06 17:49:00 UTC

  • LIBERTARIANS: Has someone already torn apart Bryan Caplan’s paper criticizing Au

    LIBERTARIANS: Has someone already torn apart Bryan Caplan’s paper criticizing Austrianism? Or do I have to? (Seriously.)

    The use of the pretense of science as a means of obscuring preferences is just ridiculous no matter what side of the fence one is on.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-01 12:33:00 UTC