Curt Doolittle

Theme: Truth

  • SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM: WARRANTY OF DUE DILIGENCE IN TRUTHFUL TESTIMONY. The purpo

    SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM: WARRANTY OF DUE DILIGENCE IN TRUTHFUL TESTIMONY.

    The purpose of scientific warranty is to reduce or eliminate imaginary content from our arguments and our theories by laundering them of error, bias, deception and fraud.

    We produce this warranty by the systematic criticism of properties upon which our statements depend:

    Internal consistency using axiomatic logic.

    External correspondence by demonstrated tests against observable phenomenon.

    Existential possibility by operational and intuitionistic definitions.

    Parsimony by falsification.

    Ethics (Voluntary transfer) by subjective testing of operational statements. (Positive)

    Morality – free of negative externality (involuntary transfer) by falsification. (Negative)

    Each of these tests criticises the theory. Each performs an act of due diligence. And only the entire suite constitutes a complete warranty, and only complete warranties are warrantable.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-05 11:48:00 UTC

  • DEMONSTATED INTELLECTUAL HONESTY Honest people prefer theories that provide incr

    DEMONSTATED INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

    Honest people prefer theories that provide increasingly parsimonious explanatory power. Dishonest people prefer theories that further justify priors, and satisfy their confirmation biases. If moral positions reflect reproductive strategies, then the only possible moral principle is voluntary exchange.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-05 08:28:00 UTC

  • If You Can Name A Thing You Can Kill A Thing

    [T]here is an ancient myth that has more than a grain of truth to it: if you can name a demon you can kill, control of dispel it.

    We all have true names. Meaning if we are fully understood we lose the power of deception.

    I am hot on the trail of a conceptual demon – the obscurant, lie that appeals to cognitive bias through suggestion.

    I think it may take me another year or more to discover it’s true name.

    But when I do, I will kill it. Or at least arm others who will kill it.

    I made progress with truth: I know how to cage that demon using the common law.

    Now I must understand how lies are constructed.  Because then I can kill it.

  • If You Can Name A Thing You Can Kill A Thing

    [T]here is an ancient myth that has more than a grain of truth to it: if you can name a demon you can kill, control of dispel it.

    We all have true names. Meaning if we are fully understood we lose the power of deception.

    I am hot on the trail of a conceptual demon – the obscurant, lie that appeals to cognitive bias through suggestion.

    I think it may take me another year or more to discover it’s true name.

    But when I do, I will kill it. Or at least arm others who will kill it.

    I made progress with truth: I know how to cage that demon using the common law.

    Now I must understand how lies are constructed.  Because then I can kill it.

  • Improving On The Main Message – It’s Getting Easier

    (reposted from elsewhere)

    [T]he scientific method consists of a set of moral rules on what scientists must consider truthful testimony. Otherwise no ‘method’ exists. The scope of these moral rules has evolved during the twentieth century in ways that I think very few people, scientists included, understand. (I will go into this a bit later if need be.)||

    Scientists do not practice (or even pay any attention to) philosophy or philosophers. Philosophers tend to be justificationists, but scientists do not practice justification. So no, scientists do not defend arenas using logic at all. That is what philosophers do when they try to defend one epistemological justification or another. Scientists demonstrate. They do not justify.

    Philosphers justify. So no, they did not evolve nor are they practiced by similar means. Rationalism and science are practiced by opposite means: justification versus demonstration and warranty.

    Scientists, and the discipline of science operate upon these epistemological principles:

    (a) we know nothing for certain, and may never be able to know anything for certain. (the most parsimonious non tautological statement possible).
    (b) we know what works and what doesn’t work. Everything else we say is just hypothesis, theory and law
    (c) all knowledge is theoretical (intuition, hypothesis, theory, or law)
    (d) we can combine theories to create models, which themselves are theories.
    (e) To publish a theory (‘distribute an intellectual product for consumption’) one must subject it tests (Provide a Warranty) stating that it is:

    i) consistent (logical)
    ii) correspondent (correlative)
    iii) empirical (observable)
    iv) operational (existentially possible)
    v) falsifiable
    vi) reasonably falsified

    The scientific method consists, if anything, in meeting these moral constraints upon their statements. It is their job to speak truthfully. But they never claim to state the truth. Even mathematicians (of any degree of sophistication) will say that truth is a problem of philosophy, while proof is a problem of mathematics.

    Mises’ argument is false because there are no non-trivial, non-tautological, certain, premises. If, as Einstein demonstrated, even time and length are concepts that we cannot count upon (length is the argument used to demonstrate the fallacy of even geometric premises). While we may imagine a point or a line, we cannot construct one. While we may imagine infinite sets, we cannot construct one. While we may imagine the square root of two, it cannot exist without a physical context to determine its arbitrary precision and therefore its existence.

    So no. Mises’ rationalism is a good story. But it’s just a story. An analogy.

    In order to warranty a statement as truthfully represented, it must meet the criteria that scientists have put forward. Science is merely a moral discipline for the purpose of truth telling. If we cannot say it scientifically then we cannot warrant that we are saying it truthfully: free of all possible error, bias, and deception.

    Mises was trying to combat the abuse of pseudoscience in economics, but he did not, as Brouwer did in math and Bridgman did in physics, discover Intuitionism, Operationalism and Operationism: the necessary test of existential possibility that checks our premises against the context in which we apply them. Praxeology was very close. But he got it wrong. If we see him in this light, as failing in economics where others succeeded in math and science, we can see Mises as part of a triumvirate that tried to add a new moral constraint to the sciences consistent with, or perhaps as an extension of falsification.
    It is unfortunate, since the reason Brouwer and Bridgman were not influential was that they failed to grasp that they were making a moral argument to the externalities caused by failing to demonstrate tests of existential possibility. whereas in economics, EVERYTHING WE WORRY ABOUT IS A PRODUCT OF EXTERNALITIES.

    Had Mises gone with Science rather than Rationalism we might have saved a century of semi-pseudoscientific argument only recently overthrown. Because in economics, externalities matter. It matters that Keynesian macro is an attempt to justify the manufacture of vast, slowly accumulating, negative externalities that burn down social and genetic capital. It matters that mathematicians talk about a mathematical reality that does not and cannot exist; that Cantorian sets are a bit of verbal nonsense by which to substitute quantity in timeless state, with frequency in a state where time is present. It matters that mathematical physics has seem to be nearly fruitless compared to physical experimentation, and that the entire multiple-world hypothesis was as nonsensical as we intuited.

    Externalities matter. And that is before we start talking about postmodernism: the most elaborate lie developed since the invention of theism.

    So the truthful, testifiable statement, is not the one Mises makes, but that no economic statement that cannot be reduced to sympathetically testable operations can be true. AND any economic proposition that has not been reduced to a sequence of sympathetically testable operations can be stated to be ethical and or moral.

    So no statement that is not open to sympathetic testing (falsification) by operational means (sympathetic testing) can be ‘true’, nor ‘scientific’ since ‘scientific’ refers to morally warrantable constraint upon one’s statements.

    Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute 

    L’viv, Ukraine.

  • Improving On The Main Message – It’s Getting Easier

    (reposted from elsewhere)

    [T]he scientific method consists of a set of moral rules on what scientists must consider truthful testimony. Otherwise no ‘method’ exists. The scope of these moral rules has evolved during the twentieth century in ways that I think very few people, scientists included, understand. (I will go into this a bit later if need be.)||

    Scientists do not practice (or even pay any attention to) philosophy or philosophers. Philosophers tend to be justificationists, but scientists do not practice justification. So no, scientists do not defend arenas using logic at all. That is what philosophers do when they try to defend one epistemological justification or another. Scientists demonstrate. They do not justify.

    Philosphers justify. So no, they did not evolve nor are they practiced by similar means. Rationalism and science are practiced by opposite means: justification versus demonstration and warranty.

    Scientists, and the discipline of science operate upon these epistemological principles:

    (a) we know nothing for certain, and may never be able to know anything for certain. (the most parsimonious non tautological statement possible).
    (b) we know what works and what doesn’t work. Everything else we say is just hypothesis, theory and law
    (c) all knowledge is theoretical (intuition, hypothesis, theory, or law)
    (d) we can combine theories to create models, which themselves are theories.
    (e) To publish a theory (‘distribute an intellectual product for consumption’) one must subject it tests (Provide a Warranty) stating that it is:

    i) consistent (logical)
    ii) correspondent (correlative)
    iii) empirical (observable)
    iv) operational (existentially possible)
    v) falsifiable
    vi) reasonably falsified

    The scientific method consists, if anything, in meeting these moral constraints upon their statements. It is their job to speak truthfully. But they never claim to state the truth. Even mathematicians (of any degree of sophistication) will say that truth is a problem of philosophy, while proof is a problem of mathematics.

    Mises’ argument is false because there are no non-trivial, non-tautological, certain, premises. If, as Einstein demonstrated, even time and length are concepts that we cannot count upon (length is the argument used to demonstrate the fallacy of even geometric premises). While we may imagine a point or a line, we cannot construct one. While we may imagine infinite sets, we cannot construct one. While we may imagine the square root of two, it cannot exist without a physical context to determine its arbitrary precision and therefore its existence.

    So no. Mises’ rationalism is a good story. But it’s just a story. An analogy.

    In order to warranty a statement as truthfully represented, it must meet the criteria that scientists have put forward. Science is merely a moral discipline for the purpose of truth telling. If we cannot say it scientifically then we cannot warrant that we are saying it truthfully: free of all possible error, bias, and deception.

    Mises was trying to combat the abuse of pseudoscience in economics, but he did not, as Brouwer did in math and Bridgman did in physics, discover Intuitionism, Operationalism and Operationism: the necessary test of existential possibility that checks our premises against the context in which we apply them. Praxeology was very close. But he got it wrong. If we see him in this light, as failing in economics where others succeeded in math and science, we can see Mises as part of a triumvirate that tried to add a new moral constraint to the sciences consistent with, or perhaps as an extension of falsification.
    It is unfortunate, since the reason Brouwer and Bridgman were not influential was that they failed to grasp that they were making a moral argument to the externalities caused by failing to demonstrate tests of existential possibility. whereas in economics, EVERYTHING WE WORRY ABOUT IS A PRODUCT OF EXTERNALITIES.

    Had Mises gone with Science rather than Rationalism we might have saved a century of semi-pseudoscientific argument only recently overthrown. Because in economics, externalities matter. It matters that Keynesian macro is an attempt to justify the manufacture of vast, slowly accumulating, negative externalities that burn down social and genetic capital. It matters that mathematicians talk about a mathematical reality that does not and cannot exist; that Cantorian sets are a bit of verbal nonsense by which to substitute quantity in timeless state, with frequency in a state where time is present. It matters that mathematical physics has seem to be nearly fruitless compared to physical experimentation, and that the entire multiple-world hypothesis was as nonsensical as we intuited.

    Externalities matter. And that is before we start talking about postmodernism: the most elaborate lie developed since the invention of theism.

    So the truthful, testifiable statement, is not the one Mises makes, but that no economic statement that cannot be reduced to sympathetically testable operations can be true. AND any economic proposition that has not been reduced to a sequence of sympathetically testable operations can be stated to be ethical and or moral.

    So no statement that is not open to sympathetic testing (falsification) by operational means (sympathetic testing) can be ‘true’, nor ‘scientific’ since ‘scientific’ refers to morally warrantable constraint upon one’s statements.

    Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute 

    L’viv, Ukraine.

  • More Examples of Arguing With Well Intentioned But Misguided Folk

    –Still not a peep about: “Even though it is perfectly true and perfectly logical that humans are subjective beings there are some who cannot fathom a scientific subjective methodology.”– Bruce Koerber

    [T]he question is not whether we can practice a subjective methodology. Nor is it honest to use psychologism as a criticism when the question is whether such a method is a logical possibility or is empirically demonstrable. (It is dishonest actually – and psychological criticism is immoral because it is dishonest.) Instead, the question is whether subjectivity yields results – empirically it doesn’t, empirically it hasn’t, and logically it can’t. This is because of a tragically simple reason: subjective testing is not axiomatic in that it is complete (the distinguishing property of an axiom). But it is instead, that economic laws, constitute “laws” (in the spectrum of intuition, hypothesis, theory and law) meaning that it they are general rules of limited precision, widely accepted, that we cannot find false.

    We can certainly TEST economic statements. But we cannot deduce economic phenomenon, nor can we observe economic phenomenon, particularly emergent economic phenomenon, without empirical methods. We can test data all day long. We do.

    The logical possibility does not exist. We cannot and do not imagine (deduce) economic phenomenon, because economic phenomenon are emergent and inter-temporally equilibrating without every reaching equilibrium. Man is also fraught with an increasing number of cognitive biases. In other words, those phenomenon are too complicated to observe and predict. This is why there are so many outstanding problems in economic theory – it’s terribly complicated.

    So the unique property of economics is that we can test first principles (human subjectivity),rather than resort to purely correlative tests. In this sense we can know if economic theories can be true, in a way that we cannot know if theories in other science can be true. And even if we know that they CAN be true, we do not know if they are ‘true’ in the metaphysical sense, of being the most parsimonious theory possible.

    We can for example, construct a mathematica proof given any set of axioms. this mathematical proof demonstrates that any mathematical expression is can be constructed using mathematical operations. We can also demonstrate a proof in economics if any economic statement can be constructed from sympathetically testable existentially possible, human operations. But mathematical models cannot demonstrate innovation due to self awareness, and intentionally bend or break axioms in order to satisfy self interest – but humans can, and do – that is what even Keyensian economics combined with trade, fiscal and monetary policy attempt to do – and successfully do.

    It is therefore immoral and unscientific (an abuse of science) to claim that economic theories that are not operationally tested are true and moral. Whether we use empirical methods to observe and test our observations of economic phenomenon is merely a necessity of observation, and a necessity of compensating for our cognitive biases that forever jaundice our reason.

    There is no exit from the above box. Sorry.

    (Plenty of ‘peeps’ in there.)

  • More Examples of Arguing With Well Intentioned But Misguided Folk

    –Still not a peep about: “Even though it is perfectly true and perfectly logical that humans are subjective beings there are some who cannot fathom a scientific subjective methodology.”– Bruce Koerber

    [T]he question is not whether we can practice a subjective methodology. Nor is it honest to use psychologism as a criticism when the question is whether such a method is a logical possibility or is empirically demonstrable. (It is dishonest actually – and psychological criticism is immoral because it is dishonest.) Instead, the question is whether subjectivity yields results – empirically it doesn’t, empirically it hasn’t, and logically it can’t. This is because of a tragically simple reason: subjective testing is not axiomatic in that it is complete (the distinguishing property of an axiom). But it is instead, that economic laws, constitute “laws” (in the spectrum of intuition, hypothesis, theory and law) meaning that it they are general rules of limited precision, widely accepted, that we cannot find false.

    We can certainly TEST economic statements. But we cannot deduce economic phenomenon, nor can we observe economic phenomenon, particularly emergent economic phenomenon, without empirical methods. We can test data all day long. We do.

    The logical possibility does not exist. We cannot and do not imagine (deduce) economic phenomenon, because economic phenomenon are emergent and inter-temporally equilibrating without every reaching equilibrium. Man is also fraught with an increasing number of cognitive biases. In other words, those phenomenon are too complicated to observe and predict. This is why there are so many outstanding problems in economic theory – it’s terribly complicated.

    So the unique property of economics is that we can test first principles (human subjectivity),rather than resort to purely correlative tests. In this sense we can know if economic theories can be true, in a way that we cannot know if theories in other science can be true. And even if we know that they CAN be true, we do not know if they are ‘true’ in the metaphysical sense, of being the most parsimonious theory possible.

    We can for example, construct a mathematica proof given any set of axioms. this mathematical proof demonstrates that any mathematical expression is can be constructed using mathematical operations. We can also demonstrate a proof in economics if any economic statement can be constructed from sympathetically testable existentially possible, human operations. But mathematical models cannot demonstrate innovation due to self awareness, and intentionally bend or break axioms in order to satisfy self interest – but humans can, and do – that is what even Keyensian economics combined with trade, fiscal and monetary policy attempt to do – and successfully do.

    It is therefore immoral and unscientific (an abuse of science) to claim that economic theories that are not operationally tested are true and moral. Whether we use empirical methods to observe and test our observations of economic phenomenon is merely a necessity of observation, and a necessity of compensating for our cognitive biases that forever jaundice our reason.

    There is no exit from the above box. Sorry.

    (Plenty of ‘peeps’ in there.)

  • Fukuyama Continues His Justification of The Monopoly State

    (Note: I kind of wonder what will happen when people figure out that the difference between Fukuyama/Asian monopoly statism and western polycentrism, is TRUTH TELLING.  Chinese lie and deceive as a matter of course, whereas in the heroic model, we pay the high cost of truth telling as demonstrated contribution to the commons. – Curt Doolittle)

    [F]rancis Fukuyama got hooked on the idea of meritocratic bureaucracy from his study of Chinese history, and in his two most recent books, works to explain the construction of the modern state, by justifying select bureaucracies. His attempt at justifying his priors is approaching the most exasperating work I have read by someone who appears to be honest and merely flawed.

    I value his work, because his comparative analysis, like that of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Pareto, Weber, and more recently Olson, is at least marginally scientific.

    However, when discussing Europe, he identifies then glosses over the most important attributes of european civilization: we developed contract rather than authority. And our ‘priesthood’ (lawyers) and contract (voluntary association) are sufficient for the production of all commons other than defense. He does not address the church-state-commerce balance of powers. Nor the incentives of a bureaucracy.

    Where most of us want to re-nationalize liberalism, and return to the contractual association of man, using law and militia as a means of policing the state, he wants to turn us all into Chinese peasants.

    He doesn’t describe why bureaucracies fail, and seems unaware of the criticism of bureaucracies. He assumes professional bureaucrats will have good interests and be accountable, rather than that such creatures only exist at the margins, and the benefit that they add is less than the damage that they cause AFTER rule of law has been implemented.

    He also ignores Putnam’s illustration of the ills of diversity – and it appears that he does so intentionally.

    So, I have work to do:

    1) demonstrate how the contractual state is superior in every possible way
    2) elaborate on the transaction cost theory of government.
    3) expand the ills of corporatism to that of anti-tribalism

    I cannot work as fast as these other people. I look at some of these guys who put a book out every year or two, and I just work so much more slowly.


  • Fukuyama Continues His Justification of The Monopoly State

    (Note: I kind of wonder what will happen when people figure out that the difference between Fukuyama/Asian monopoly statism and western polycentrism, is TRUTH TELLING.  Chinese lie and deceive as a matter of course, whereas in the heroic model, we pay the high cost of truth telling as demonstrated contribution to the commons. – Curt Doolittle)

    [F]rancis Fukuyama got hooked on the idea of meritocratic bureaucracy from his study of Chinese history, and in his two most recent books, works to explain the construction of the modern state, by justifying select bureaucracies. His attempt at justifying his priors is approaching the most exasperating work I have read by someone who appears to be honest and merely flawed.

    I value his work, because his comparative analysis, like that of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Pareto, Weber, and more recently Olson, is at least marginally scientific.

    However, when discussing Europe, he identifies then glosses over the most important attributes of european civilization: we developed contract rather than authority. And our ‘priesthood’ (lawyers) and contract (voluntary association) are sufficient for the production of all commons other than defense. He does not address the church-state-commerce balance of powers. Nor the incentives of a bureaucracy.

    Where most of us want to re-nationalize liberalism, and return to the contractual association of man, using law and militia as a means of policing the state, he wants to turn us all into Chinese peasants.

    He doesn’t describe why bureaucracies fail, and seems unaware of the criticism of bureaucracies. He assumes professional bureaucrats will have good interests and be accountable, rather than that such creatures only exist at the margins, and the benefit that they add is less than the damage that they cause AFTER rule of law has been implemented.

    He also ignores Putnam’s illustration of the ills of diversity – and it appears that he does so intentionally.

    So, I have work to do:

    1) demonstrate how the contractual state is superior in every possible way
    2) elaborate on the transaction cost theory of government.
    3) expand the ills of corporatism to that of anti-tribalism

    I cannot work as fast as these other people. I look at some of these guys who put a book out every year or two, and I just work so much more slowly.