Theme: Truth

  • SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IM

    SCIENCE AS TRUTHFUL SPEECH – GERMAN RATIONALISM AND JEWISH COSMOPOLITANISM AS IMMORAL INFORMATION DISTORTION EQUAL TO THE INFORMATION DISTORTION OF KEYNSIAN ECONOMICS.

    (mind-blowing)(creative)(draft one)

    Occam’s razor:

    Is it more likely that German rationalism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, both of which were intentionally designed as obscurant anti-scientific deceptions to re-impose their culture’s authoritarianism as a replacement for the faith needed to maintain group competitive evolutionary strategy, are correct in their classification of economics as an axiomatic logic (logically operational system), and that such a discipline is somehow not subject to the same moral and epistemological constraint in demonstrative method, as are all disciplines that claim to construct laws?

    Or is it more likely that all disciplines – economics and mathematics included – seek to produce laws from which they can construct models – and that the hypotheses, theories, and laws within those models, require the same moral constraints in demonstrated method regardless of discipline – logical(internally consistent), experimental (externally correspondent), operational(existentially possible), intuitionistic (subjectively testable), and moral (constrained to voluntary transfers) – BUT (and that BUT is important) that each discipline requires only some subset of such properties given the domain of inquiry?

    In other words, do not the moral rules developed in science constitute a universal method of moral inquiry into the production of true statements, regardless of discipline? Or are there no universal laws of moral inquiry for the purpose of developing truthful statements?

    Is it more likely that more complex systems require greater moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and less complex systems less moral constraint (testing) prior to making truth claims, and that whether we require more or less constraint prior to making truth claims, depends upon the properties from which any given system of reasoning is constituted?

    COMPARISONS

    So lets compare the different approaches on just a few axis:

    1) Some economic laws are deducible VS Economic Regularities are explainable by deduction, and thus those hypothesis obtain the status of theory, and when all marginally impactful permutations are identified, these theories can be claimed truthfully as laws.

    2) All economic laws are deducible VS Some economic laws are deducible perhaps, but that does not they are not empirically based (obtained through observation). It means only that no instrumentation other than human-sense-perception is needed to make those observations and deductions. While most non-trivial economic phenomenon and the hypotheses theories and laws we use to describe them are ONLY instrumentally and empirically observable. But once observed, with the assistance of further empirical observations, they are also explainable by deduction using sympathetic testing.

    3) Economic laws are deterministic VS Economic Laws are imprecise general rules of arbitrary precision, that demonstrate the greatest variation in outcome, of all general rules of arbitrary precision in all systems dependent upon the operational use of regular patterns (other than language), in all the logics (identity, mathematics, physics, economics, and language) with the least (precise) determinacy of the logics; because:

    (a) humans act to bend such laws constantly, for personal gain, and;

    (b) humans attempt to mitigate determinacy (equilibrium) by constructing various permanent disequilibrium that they can continue to extract benefit from, and;

    (c) because causal density (opportunity) is so high, any equilibrating effect can be offset by any other equilibrating effect, and often function in combination, and;

    (d) because non-regular events, outside the normal distribution (shocks/black swans) are more influential and less predictable than regular patterns.

    4) that economics is unique methodological area of inquiry VS economics benefits merely from the fact that we can subjectively test first principles, whereas in physical science, as yet, we do not know the first principles, while in identity, naming, mathematics, we do. Even if we do not know it *yet* in physics, economics, language, and imagination. If we know the first principles of any system, we can in fact, explain all phenomenon using those first principles. Even if we cannot imagine or deduce or hypothesize all consequentially emergent phenomenon. And since we cannot deduce all economic phenomenon (there are many unsolved problems of economics, as well as mathematics, and certainly of science). It may be possible that in any complex system we will never exhaust all emergent phenomenon (although this certainly seems unlikely if the universe is deterministic).

    UNDERSTANDING ARBITRARY PRECISION IN GENERAL RULES

    (note: this sequence is a particularly interesting new idea)

    The meaning of “arbitrary precision” across disciplines must be understood:

    (a) The predictive precision of Identity (laws of categorization) remains tautological no matter what we do.

    (b) The predictive precision of naming (laws of numbering) remains operational and tautological no matter what we do.

    (c) The predictive precision of Mathematical laws (laws of relations) remains constant independent of physical scale. But since mathematics is an axiomatic system, we cannot take action to alter the consequences of mathematical systems (grok that for a second).

    (d) The predictive precision of Physical laws (laws of causality) currently varies dependent upon physical scale because we do not know the first principles of the physical universe – yet. And we can alter the course of physical events and benefit from them – in fact the purpose of human action is to predict and alter the course of physical events in order to benefit from them.

    (e) The predictive precision of Economic Laws (laws of human cooperation) varies considerably, and we constantly alter the course of events to benefit from them, by attempting to outwit the altered course of events.

    (f) The predictive precision of Linguistic laws (laws of communication/negotiation) are extremely imprecise,demonstrating extraordinary variability, with only a few general, and somewhat deterministic rules such as the evolution toward song, or tonal speech, which requires less effort from the speaker, but the meaning of such speech appears both functional (increasing in information density while gradually losing earlier meaning).

    (g) The predictive precision of Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can imagine things) is unknown, but at least if operationally limited, appears to be FUNCTIONALLY unlimited. (A function is the name for collection of mental operations reduced to a general rule that obviates the need for performing more primitive operations – a mental habit that we can trust.)

    (h) The predictive precision of Inverse Laws of Imagination (laws by which we can describe categories that we cannot imagine), even if we can ever construct such a set of laws, is nearly useless except as a check on our claims of Laws of Imagination. This is because functions (general rules of arbitrary precision constituting deterministic results of complex operations) even if we cannot conceptualize the content of those functions (cannot operationalize them), appear at present to be infinitely scalable even if decreasingly precise.

    This is the problem with economic laws – they are extremely imprecise compared to physical laws, although possibly more precise than linguistic, imaginary and inverse-imaginary laws. Predicting the future location of water and gas molecules in real world phenomenon is almost impossible except at very loose degrees of precision. Predicting the future actions of man in real world scenarios is even less precise. We can explain, historically, what man accomplished, but we cannot predict what any individual will experience.

    Because of the time and complexity of human phenomenon, just as in physical phenomenon, we can act to alter the course of events to some degree, within the bounds of those imprecise laws.

    Now there may be consequences to these actions: saving and interest have positive cumulative consequences, and expansionary credit has negative cumulative consequences. But that is not to say that we cannot distinguish between those actions that we can take to alter the course of events that produce positive and negative consequences. And that we cannot act to profit from the positive, and avoid actions that are negative. Banking and interest are economic actions. Weights and measures are positive economic actions. Laws that suppress free riding in all forms are positive economic actions. States as Insurer of last resort appear to produce a mix of positive and negative but overwhelmingly positive results. All these institutional actions constitute good policy – the production of beneficial commons that facilitate cooperation and prosperity.

    Furthermore, the extension of organized suppression of free-riding into the bureaucracy, and into the system of representation, by eliminating the monopoly bureaucracy, and eliminating political representation, and eliminating legislative law, might be an additional institutional improvement that would facilitate human cooperation and prosperity.

    Now we can argue that the Keynesian attempt to distort the monetary information system by involuntarily increasing everyone’s risk through ‘lying’ about demand, and therefore increasing employment and consumption is a terrible means by which to interfere with the economy. It is only slightly better than the destruction of the information system by which we cooperate in the economy by socialist and communist folly. But we may not say that there are other economic institutions that we could experimentally construct that would provide improved means of cooperation, and prosperity that would not constitute lies, any more than credit and interest constitute lies.

    For example,

    – To create an urban market, members (shareholders) must suppress the profitability of raiding and conquest of their market by those who are not shareholders.

    – If tribal raiders and herdsman want to participate in an urban market then they must eschew theft and raiding for entry into the market. That is a voluntary exchange.

    – If farmers work the land, and want to participate in the market using their excess production in order to buy goods that they cannot produce themselves, they must obey the rules of buyers and sellers set by the shareholders of the market.

    – If people wish to abandon self production, and work entirely within the market they must adopt the behavior of shareholders and defend the exclusive means of their sustenance.

    – If people no longer can work in self production, nor can they work in the market in order to obtain their sustenance, then they have no means of survival so continuing to participate in the shareholder agreement is no longer a rational exchange.

    – If people who cannot work in the market are willing to work to maintain the shareholder agreement for shareholders (maintain the commons, including the commons of property rights, which makes the voluntary organization of production possible) then it is rational to pay them to construct the voluntary organization of production and to return to being consumers within that market – their contribution being not the consumption, but the production of the voluntary organization of production itself. However it is also rational to limit those people to one child so that they both can reproduce, but not commit the immoral act of imposing costs upon those who are productive, by generating additional offspring. This then constitutes a voluntary exchange and productive work, even if those people are not participating in the production of goods and services, they are participating in and being paid for the effort of constructing the voluntary organization of production.

    So to say that it is not rational or scientific or necessary to experiment in the economy, or that such experimentation is not empirical (open to observation and measurement), is clearly false. It is merely that there are moral and immoral means of doing so, and that monetary policy as we currently practice it is immoral – and not very intelligent. It produces the predicted results. So it is clearly scientific and ‘true’. But that does not mean it isn’t immoral and harmful. And the cumulative effect of this policy is empirically genocidal by all extant measures.

    SO BACK TO OCCAM’S RAZOR:

    Isn’t the purpose of Rationalist and Cosmopolitan arguments of the heterodox so-called, Austrians, merely convoluted verbal justification for rebelling against political experimentation in the manipulation of the economy for the purpose of producing commons? Isn’t all their obscurantism just pseudoscientific justification for the desire to justify non-contribution to the commons? Isn’t it just an elaborate excuse for free riding?

    Isn’t the more simple answer that each logic that we have developed was developed to test certain subsets of properties, and that each subset of properties requires testing against error, bias and deception. And that as the complexity of the phenomenon increases we must test or not test those properties intrinsic to the system that we seek to test?

    Isn’t our fascination with the rules of mathematics simply because the means of deduction and the means of explanation are nearly identical: mathematical operations? Whereas mathematical discovery, all conclusions are assumed in the axioms and state-independent, whereas the result of human cooperation is determined more so by externalities than by the general rules? And that for any individual, events they experience are kaleidic and economic laws are only predictive in the aggregate?

    Isn’t all the information necessary for prediction in an axiomatic system present at the definition of the axioms, while limited and insufficiently predictive information is present in economic laws? Aren’t economic laws the equivalent of bell-curves, rather than demonstrated tails? Isn’t the information necessary to predict tail events many orders of magnitude higher than predicting events in a regular distribution?

    So the demonstrated evidence in the history of rationalism, the obvious incentives of rationalists as authoritarians, and the logical conclusion we must come to, is that deductive reasoning is non-predictive. Because deduction did not produce general economic rules, and it cannot identify candidates for general rules. It can only test whether general rules are true regardless of their origins, and explain those general rules as a set of operations.

    Because we are not scientifically testing, experimenting with, those laws of human behavior, but we are scientifically testing the interactions of those various laws of human behavior in kaleidic action, and taking advantage of altering those phenomenon of human activity just as we take advantage of altering the course of events of physical phenomenon. We are not testing first principles but the interaction between emergent phenomenon caused by the use of those principles in real time.

    The laws of the physical universe and of man, appear to be trivial, but the emergent phenomenon of those simple rules appears to be infinite and unpredictable, even if they are explainable.

    The physical universe and man, may in fact, follow predictable regular rules. Those rules are only interesting and useful in so far as we can learn how to bend them, and break them, for our use.

    Property rights for example, bend and break human behavior. Credit and interest for example let us bend and break human behavior. Monogamous marriage lets us bend and break human behavior. The extension of property rights and the prohibition on inbreeding bent and broke the human behavior that made high velocity economies possible. First principles of human behavior may exist but novel means of manipulating it for the production of prosperity are always available to us.

    THE PURPOSE OF TRUTH IS TESTIMONY – OUR INFORMATION SYSTEM

    Just as we may not interfere with the monetary system because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by informational distortion, we may not interfere with the ‘truthful’ information system created by verbal error, bias, distortion and deception, because of the cumulative effect of ‘lies’ created by error, bias, and deception.

    There is no reason we must hide our group evolutionary strategies, other than for the purposes of parasitism – lying. And if we wish to understand the law of human cooperation, it is that cooperation is only rational in the absence of parasitism, and that only truthful, fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary exchange free of negative externality constitutes ‘true’ information. And that all else is, just as monetary information is,

    THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER SOMETHING IS EMPIRICAL OR RATIONAL, BUT WHETHER IT IS TRUE, TRUTHFULLY STATED, AND WARRANTIED.

    And there is but one universal moral principle:

    (a) truthfully stated

    (b) fully informed

    (c) productive

    (d) warrantied

    (e) voluntary exchange

    (f) free of negative externality

    And there is but one universal moral warrant: that any statement is:

    (a) internally consistent (logically tested)

    (b) externally correspondent (evidentially tested as meaningfully predictive and/or explicative)

    (c) falsifiable and falsified (tested for parsimony)

    (d) existentially possible (operationally defined)

    (e) moral(independent of immoral transfer)

    As such, since German Rationalism, and Jewish Cosmopolitan Rationalism is not warranted, truthful speech, and cannot constitute a moral, voluntary exchange, and is equal in immorality to economic disinformation created by distortion of the money supply.

    It’s not that Keynesian economics is unscientific it’s that it’s immoral. It’s not so much that German Rationalism and Jewish Cosmopolitan rationalism are not simply a backwards-expression of intuitionism and operationalism under empiricism, despite it’s inability to produce insights and only explain them. It’s instead, that the rationalist position is an attempt to intellectual outlaw investigation into emergent economic phenomenon – which is the purpose of scientific investigation, just as much as experimental psychology is the discipline that investigates first principles – and which has discovered the reason for our long list of cognitive biases that produce non-rational actions not anticipated by the classical model.

    There is no need for German and Jewish dishonest Rationalism, any more than there is a need for Keynesian dishonest economics. Liberty is possible under science, because science is the language of morality – of truthful speech free of involuntary transfer, by fraud. Liberty is a synonym for objective morality.

    Our solution is neither British Keynesian immorality nor German and Jewish immorality, nor anglo-american pseudoscientific immorality (neo-puritanism), but truth speaking, and moral, voluntary exchange across peoples with different evolutionary strategies.

    Truth, Science, and Morality are synonyms.

    And we would all be better off without all the immorality, pseudoscience, rationalism, and lying.

    Voluntary exchange is enough.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine


    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 07:00:00 UTC

  • WE CAN RESTORE TRUTH, REASON, AND THE CIVIC SOCIETY FROM THE PEOPLE WHO TAUGHT U

    WE CAN RESTORE TRUTH, REASON, AND THE CIVIC SOCIETY FROM THE PEOPLE WHO TAUGHT US TO LIE

    It took from 1780 to 1980 for the Germans, Jews and Americans to destroy reason. It has taken us from 1980 to the present to incrementally attempt to reconstruct it. And if I am successful, and at some point, rule of law, as a common (organic, self-organizing) law, can be based upon Propertarian logic, then it will no longer be possible to commit such an egregious crime against humanity. Property en toto, protected by a prohibition on transfers not constituting productive, truthful, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of negative externality consisting in the same conditions, and under universal standing, is sufficient to eliminate the need for regulatory governance and all legislation; and reduces the need for government to the production of commons that cannot be produced in the market without insurance against privatization of such commons, socialization of losses into those commons, or free ridging upon the contributions of others who constructed the commons.

    We can reconstruct truth, truthfulness, testimony, and the civic society. Self organizing organically evolutionary law, property en toto under propertarian ethical constraints, and universal standing are enough.

    If a few men are willing to use organized violence to force the implementation of such rule of law over the continued practice of systemic deception, due to the systemic attack on reason, science, and truth telling, by the most ambitious attempt conspiracy of liars in human history outside of the monotheists.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine


    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-25 05:21:00 UTC

  • (INTRODUCTORY READING 6) RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RAT

    (INTRODUCTORY READING 6)

    RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM.

    “The Silver Rule Wins over The Golden Rule Too – for the same reason.”

    Macro economic phenomenon are emergent and non-deducible even if they are explainable. As such economics is no different from any other constructed upon laws : theories of arbitrary precision open to constant reformation. For economic theories to be testified as true, we must demonstrate that they are open to construction by sympathetic tests.

    As such, just as the golden rule is backwards, and the silver rule is correct, Mises just has praxeology backwards, it’s that we can’t claim something is true unless we can explain it as rational actions, but that does not mean we cannot rely upon observations and instrumentation to help us observe and criticize emergent phenomenon. Empiricists claim that other than some intrinsic simple intuitions (grammar, intention, status signal, and empathy etc), all knowledge is gained from sense experience, and this includes all deductions (cognitive science agrees with this hypothesis). This is obvious to people educated after 1980, when cognitive science began to replace psychology, and accelerated after 2000, when pinker restated cognition.

    Instrumentalists argue, correctly, that phenomenon must be reduced to stimuli open to human sense experience and comparison. This is also obvious.

    But then how do we test our hypothesies? We cannot subjectively test physical phenomenon, nor can we reason with the first principles of the universe – we don’t know them.

    So for physical phenomenon we must create experiments to test our hypothesis, where in human phenomenon the same test results are obtained by introspection: if subject to the same stimuli would a reasonable person come to the same conclusion? We could not judge intent or trust others if we did not have this ability so we are marginally indifferent in our ability to judge intentions if possessed of similar (symmetric) knowledge. (This is why informational symmetry is so important.)

    So in matters of human action where we know the first principles, all phenomenon, whether deducible or emergent, must be explainable as a sequence of rational human actions each of which is subject to subjective testing by means of information and sympathy – or it cannot be true. Just as all measurements (observations) of physical tests must be possible to perform in order for the claims of the test to be true. (Bridgman). Just as all mathematical proofs must be open to construction via basic mathematical operations for them to be true. Just as any propertarian law must be constructed from productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers free of negative externality.

    So all scientific disciplines are identical in dependence upon empirical (sense experience) instrumental (reduction to sense experience) operational (existentially possible) constraints.

    THE COUNTER-PROPOSITION

    No one disagrees that if economic phenomenon are not explainable in rational terms that the theory cannot be true.

    The question of economic science is how we can take advantage of emergent phenomenon to bring forward productivity and consumption (wealth) as a means of improving the commons. This is the purpose of credit and interest. But this principle can be applied in hundreds of permutations throughout the economy.

    The moral (German Austrian) implication, is that this study must eschew immoral manipulation (thefts) and work only to improve the institutional means of moral cooperation without the conduct of thefts.

    The immoral (anglo empirical) implication is that this study should seek Pareto optimums (Rawlsian ethics) by reframing ‘harm’ by discounting loss of choice by some to redistribute choice to others.

    I agree with the German thesis, and expressly disagree with the anglo universalist fallacy which has gotten us to this state entirely because anglos were able to seduce the germans into the world war.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine


    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-24 13:30:00 UTC

  • RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM. The S

    RATIONALISTS JUST HAVE IT BACKWARDS – JUSTIFICATION RATHER THAN CRITICISM. The Silver Rule Wins over The Golden Rule Too – for the same reason.

    Macro economic phenomenon are emergent and non-deducible even if they are explainable. As such economics is no different from any other constructed upon laws : theories of arbitrary precision open to constant reformation. For economic theories to be testified as true, we must demonstrate that they are open to construction by sympathetic tests.

    As such, just as the golden rule is backwards, and the silver rule is correct, Mises just has praxeology backwards, it’s that we can’t claim something is true unless we can explain it as rational actions, but that does not mean we cannot rely upon observations and instrumentation to help us observe and criticize emergent phenomenon. Empiricists claim that other than some intrinsic simple intuitions (grammar, intention, status signal, and empathy etc), all knowledge is gained from sense experience, and this includes all deductions (cognitive science agrees with this hypothesis). This is obvious to people educated after 1980, when cognitive science began to replace psychology, and accelerated after 2000, when pinker restated cognition.

    Instrumentalists argue, correctly, that phenomenon must be reduced to stimuli open to human sense experience and comparison. This is also obvious.

    But then how do we test our hypothesies? We cannot subjectively test physical phenomenon, nor can we reason with the first principles of the universe – we don’t know them.

    So for physical phenomenon we must create experiments to test our hypothesis, where in human phenomenon the same test results are obtained by introspection: if subject to the same stimuli would a reasonable person come to the same conclusion? We could not judge intent or trust others if we did not have this ability so we are marginally indifferent in our ability to judge intentions if possessed of similar (symmetric) knowledge. (This is why informational symmetry is so important.)

    So in matters of human action where we know the first principles, all phenomenon, whether deducible or emergent, must be explainable as a sequence of rational human actions each of which is subject to subjective testing by means of information and sympathy – or it cannot be true. Just as all measurements (observations) of physical tests must be possible to perform in order for the claims of the test to be true. (Bridgman). Just as all mathematical proofs must be open to construction via basic mathematical operations for them to be true. Just as any propertarian law must be constructed from productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfers free of negative externality.

    So all scientific disciplines are identical in dependence upon empirical (sense experience) instrumental (reduction to sense experience) operational (existentially possible) constraints.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine


    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-24 12:40:00 UTC

  • Science Is A Moral Discipline In Which We Struggle to Speak Truthfully

    [S]cience is a moral discipline wherein we criticize our ideas, so that we can speak them truthfully: 1 — We test our relations for categorical consistency (identity) 2— We test our reasoning with logic for internal consistency. 3— We test our observations with external correspondence. 4— We test the existential possibilities of our premises by defining them in operational language 5— We test the rationality of our choices by subjective testing of incentives – all human action is rationally self interested. 6— We test the morality of our display, word, and deed by reciprocity: reciprocal tests of rationality. 7— We test the consequences of our theories for externalities (involuntary transfers). 8— We test the completeness of our statements with a tests of full accounting and limits. 9— We test the coherence of our statements with this list of constant relations both categorical, internal, external, existential, complete, and limited, including the rational when a matter of personal action, and reciprocal when a matter of interpersonal and political action. Once we have tested our theories by these means, then we can say that we speak truthfully – and as such do no harm. Because scientific method consists of due diligences necessary to warranty that we speak truthfully.  And by truthfully we mean consistent, correspondent, complete, rational, and moral, and laundered of ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism and deceit. Curt Doolittle Testimonialism and Propertarianism The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • Science Is A Moral Discipline In Which We Struggle to Speak Truthfully

    [S]cience is a moral discipline wherein we criticize our ideas, so that we can speak them truthfully: 1 — We test our relations for categorical consistency (identity) 2— We test our reasoning with logic for internal consistency. 3— We test our observations with external correspondence. 4— We test the existential possibilities of our premises by defining them in operational language 5— We test the rationality of our choices by subjective testing of incentives – all human action is rationally self interested. 6— We test the morality of our display, word, and deed by reciprocity: reciprocal tests of rationality. 7— We test the consequences of our theories for externalities (involuntary transfers). 8— We test the completeness of our statements with a tests of full accounting and limits. 9— We test the coherence of our statements with this list of constant relations both categorical, internal, external, existential, complete, and limited, including the rational when a matter of personal action, and reciprocal when a matter of interpersonal and political action. Once we have tested our theories by these means, then we can say that we speak truthfully – and as such do no harm. Because scientific method consists of due diligences necessary to warranty that we speak truthfully.  And by truthfully we mean consistent, correspondent, complete, rational, and moral, and laundered of ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism and deceit. Curt Doolittle Testimonialism and Propertarianism The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine

  • We Never Know Anything. We Just Try. We Learn What Works.

    [T]his is why the rationalist argument is a straw man. Critical Rationalism won. In propertarianism I focus on truthful speech as an IMPROVEMENT on critical rationalism’s narrow focus in the absence of ethical and moral constraints (imposed costs, such as creating a hazard). So operationalism is an existential test – a further criticism, on top of falsification, that is necessary when we speak of matters that may impose costs upon one another.


    I can never know that I speak the ultimate truth, but I can know if I speak truthfully (morally). I can warranty truthful speech but I cannot warrant a statement is true.


    And in publishing information into the commons I am distributing a product which may do harm or good. And I can be held accountable for unwarrantable speech, or unwarranted speech, but if I have warrantied my speech I cannot be held accountable in law for the negative consequences of it.


    Conversely, if I did, then I CAN be held accountable for it.


    So it is by these means I have tried to:

    ….(a) Extend critical rationalism by adding the additional requirement of operational description – something scientists already do but outside of psychology do not recognize as necessary criticism, and something that is necessary for all political questions, since only political questions require by definition transfers.

    ….(b) Redefine the scientific method as the method of speaking truthfully (warrantably).

    ….(c) Incorporate the principle of the voluntary exchange of property as the only test of moral action.

    UNIVERSAL STANDING

    Under universal standing each of us can protect his or her commons from lies, cheats, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, and even the use and abuse of others – we an all act as sheriffs. We cannot resort to political favoritism.

    The only problem is in creating judges. And we seem to be far better at creating judges than economists and philosophers.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • We Never Know Anything. We Just Try. We Learn What Works.

    [T]his is why the rationalist argument is a straw man. Critical Rationalism won. In propertarianism I focus on truthful speech as an IMPROVEMENT on critical rationalism’s narrow focus in the absence of ethical and moral constraints (imposed costs, such as creating a hazard). So operationalism is an existential test – a further criticism, on top of falsification, that is necessary when we speak of matters that may impose costs upon one another.


    I can never know that I speak the ultimate truth, but I can know if I speak truthfully (morally). I can warranty truthful speech but I cannot warrant a statement is true.


    And in publishing information into the commons I am distributing a product which may do harm or good. And I can be held accountable for unwarrantable speech, or unwarranted speech, but if I have warrantied my speech I cannot be held accountable in law for the negative consequences of it.


    Conversely, if I did, then I CAN be held accountable for it.


    So it is by these means I have tried to:

    ….(a) Extend critical rationalism by adding the additional requirement of operational description – something scientists already do but outside of psychology do not recognize as necessary criticism, and something that is necessary for all political questions, since only political questions require by definition transfers.

    ….(b) Redefine the scientific method as the method of speaking truthfully (warrantably).

    ….(c) Incorporate the principle of the voluntary exchange of property as the only test of moral action.

    UNIVERSAL STANDING

    Under universal standing each of us can protect his or her commons from lies, cheats, socialization of losses, privatization of gains, and even the use and abuse of others – we an all act as sheriffs. We cannot resort to political favoritism.

    The only problem is in creating judges. And we seem to be far better at creating judges than economists and philosophers.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

  • Hoppe’s Misrepresentation of Empiricism

    “This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.” ~Hans/Hermann Hoppe

    —“Logic is powerful enough to expose weak arguments, wouldn’t you say?”— Bruce Koerber 

    —“Curt Doolittle, can you provide a counter to this? At first glance it appears impenetrable.”— Pattern Principle

    [N]othing like asking me to answer a very hard problem in philosophy. I can answer it. But whether it is digestible or not is something else

    To begin with, It’s a straw man argument; which is why its deceptively simple. No one makes the claim that empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can possess. No one. Rather, only philosophers do, none still do, and scientists certainly don’t.  

    ACTUALLY, WHAT HOPPE ATTRIBUTES TO EMPIRICISTS IS NOT WHAT THE EMPIRICISTS CLAIM.
    One of the reasons why you are misunderstood is that you tend not to confront the topics you deal with head on.Hoppe is a justificationist and so he mines a particular weakness of justificationist empiricism. One you jettison justification, his “argument collapses”- Ayelam Valentine Agaliba
    (Worse, he equates science with empiricism, and empiricism with positivism.)

    And economists do not claim to be philosophers, they claim to be scientists. It is one thing to say philosophers (rationalists) say such a thing and another to say scientists, and in particular economic scientists, would say such a thing (they don’t).

    Instead, they say that we cannot trust our reason except in the most trivial of cases: those at experiential human scale. And the discipline of economics is by definition one beyond experiential human scale, or we would not need prices with which to coordinate our efforts, or property to provide us with incentives – we could just ‘sense it’. But we can’t.

    Instead, we say that, depending upon the domain of inquiry, we require logical(rational), empirical(correspondent), and operational (existentially demonstrable) trials to test our theories, because theories are prone to contain imaginary and erroneous information that must be held separate from causal information. In this sense, we do not create theories justifiably or reasonably, we instead come to theories however we do, and we criticize them by logical, empirical, operational, and falsificational means.

    Examples: in mathematics the means of investigation and the means of proof are nearly identical. But some mathematical deductions are not constructible, so intuitionism requires that once a solution is obtained by whatever means, we go back and explain it operationally, demonstrating that it can be actually constructed by means of possible mathematical operations.

    In economics, we can make empirical observations, but until we go through and describe them as a series of human actions each of which is sympathetically testable then we do not know that the theory is true even if it always produces correlative results.
    in physics we do not know the first principles of the physical world as we do in mathematics (mathematical operations), or in economics (rational human actions in response to stimuli), so we must describe the act of taking the measurements themselves in order to ensure that we are not adding imaginary content to our theories.

    The end of rationalism occurred when Einstein demonstrated that we cannot even take the concepts of time and length for granted in our premises. Bridgman demonstrated that the only want to know when we have crossed the limit of arbitrary precision assumed in the premises of our theories is when we operationally construct them – since repetition of the operations in the new context will expose the failure of prior assumptions. Popper’s falsificationism is an incomplete attempt to demonstrate that falsification is necessary to ‘narrow’ more parsimonious (precise) statements, and that criticism is the means of narrowing theories to ever greater degrees of precision.

    The only thing particularly interesting about economics is that because all human beings are able to cooperate by sympathy with intent, we can also judge whether incentives are rational (with very imprecise limits). As such we are able to subjectively test economic statements for rationality (decidability is the correct term).

    Now once we have stumbled upon a theory, in order to make a truth claim, we must demonstrate that some subset of this set of tests have been satisfied: in other words, we must warranty our statements in order to claim that we speak the truth.

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally Consistent (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily “Choose-able” (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market Irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    ..yet not all theoretical systems necessitate most of these claims. In economics for example, we must satisfy 5, but in mathematics we solve this same problem by the axiom of choice (adding additional information), and in physics it’s meaningless.

    But the net is that if ‘knowledge’ refers to truth claims, and if all non-tautological premises are context dependent – a degree of precision – (they are), and if we cannot know the boundaries of that precision (we can’t), then all premises are theoretical(they are), and if all knowledge is then theoretical (it is) and the means of discovery are irrelevant (they are), and operational construction is instead the test of true statements, not the statements themselves, (it is), and if economic principles must be operationally constructed – praxeologically – (they must), yet not all emergent phenomenon are deducible (they aren’t) and the degree of arbitrary precision available to economic theories is extremely limited (it is), then instrumentation is necessary to measure phenomenon within the limits of arbitrary precision (it is), and minor actions will produce uncertain effects within the boundaries of arbitrary precision (they do), and that we can experiment within those bounds (we can and do). (In fact all human action takes place within the universe’s boundaries – which is why we can act in the first place.)

    Now that said, no scientist says that only empirical knowledge is true, we say only that man’s reason is frail and we require instrumentation to test it. It is irrelevant how we come to a theory, and irrelevant if we can justify it if it works, but it is through criticism that we progressively increase the content of a theory until it is the most parsimonious that we can manage for the context we consider, given the logical and physical tools at our disposal.

    FLIPPING IT AROUND
    Now, in Propertarianism I argue that scientists discovered the means of truth telling, and that philosophers(rationalists) did not – instead I argue -which isnt very hard given the twentieth century- most often, that philosophers are usually the best liars. And that the weakness in scientific argument is, that as producers of a luxury good, scientists ignore costs in the description of their theories. Whereas in economics we consider costs. So by adding our understanding of costs back into the scientific method, we discover that it’s the best truth-telling method in general that we have discovered. And that by struggling to speak the truth scientists made dramatic progress in all of their fields. This is why the scientific method is not a method, but a set of moral prescriptions for what we may claim to truthfully say and what not.

    Conversely, rationalism has been used systemically to create the most complex and destructive lies and pseudosciences known to man – most of which are moral, legal political and economic. Because it is profitable to create complex lies in those industries just as it is (often, not always) unprofitable to create complex lies in science. It’s just that by the time someone figures it out in economics and politics, the opportunity to correct it has passed, while in science their is no expiration date on the damage that can be done to one’s reputation (capital of scientists).

    So it is not just that we can come to knowledge by any means possible and criticize it by all necessary means available to us, but that rationalism has been used to lie and steal and murder more than any other discipline and that it is far more error prone than truth telling, and truth telling is a very hard thing to do.

    It is one thing to say ‘this works’ or “i can say this’ and it is another to say that you are speaking it truthfully: meaning scientifically. When you speak scientifically it is possible to be fairly certain your statements are truthful, and when you speak rationally we know only that they may be meaningful, but not necessarily truthful (scientific.)

    The world has adopted scientific language as the language of truth speaking in all fields, almost entirely because it is less prone to deception and error than rationalism.

    So in my work, I want to take what is useful from Hoppe: the reduction of all moral propositions to property rights – but I feel I must rescue liberty from the language of liars, thieves, mystics, and authoritarianism, and translate it into scientific language: the language of truth-speaking: science.

    Because while you may not be aware of it, the central reason for western superiority was our discovery of truth telling. No one else did it. And it is the reason the west separated from the rest.

    Truth speaking creates trust, trust reduces transaction costs, reduced transaction costs create economic velocity, economic velocity creates prosperity, prosperity gives us choices, and the greatest variety of choices means the satisfaction of the most subjective values.

    Truth is very expensive. It is the most expensive normative commons in the world.

    And that is why it is so rare.

    SUMMARY
    All non tautological knowledge is theoretical and contextual, and we determine what we can testify to by criticizing it, not by the means of obtaining it. The means of obtaining it is irrelevant.

    Economics, like all disciplines that investigate that which is beyond human scales of perception is a ratio-empirical discipline because we cannot observe phenomenon without instrumentation and measures, and we cannot test internal consistency without reason. The correct interpretation of praxeology is that all observable phenomenon must be open to rational construction by the decisions and actions of human beings. This applies to all disciplines. Without exception. The general hypothesis of Austrians is that distortionary activity is amplified and extended in time. this appears to be true, but at a very imprecise level and the current debate is over the trade-offs, which is why it remains unsettled. But the empirical investigation into economic phenomenon within that degree of precision (which is enormously imprecise) is necessary, and by any and all definitions, scientific. Interference in such an economy is immoral, but it is scientific, and investigation of interstitial phenomenon it is scientific. Not all phenomenon (regular patterns) are deducible from first principles, however, they must be explainable by means of deduction once discovered to be claimed as truthful.

    CLOSING
    I think i should have done a fair job of criticizing the straw man argument, providing the explanation for the fundamental questions of how science rather than the straw man of ‘empiricism’ operates, demonstrating the importance of it, and why I am working so hard to convert Hoppe’s rationalism into scientific argument – to protect it from irrelevant nonsense arguments and justifiable marginalization. I had only a few hours to work on this on and off, and I can probably improve it. But I promise that I am very good at what I do and if you work with it, you should find it very helpful. If not and I failed you I am sorry but I will keep trying to simplify the arguments further over time.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

  • Hoppe’s Misrepresentation of Empiricism

    “This is empiricism’s central claim: Empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable by experience; and analytical knowledge, which is not so verifiable or falsifiable, thus cannot contain any empirical knowledge. If this is true, then it is fair to ask: What then is the status of this fundamental statement of empiricism? Evidently it must be either analytical or empirical.” ~Hans/Hermann Hoppe

    —“Logic is powerful enough to expose weak arguments, wouldn’t you say?”— Bruce Koerber 

    —“Curt Doolittle, can you provide a counter to this? At first glance it appears impenetrable.”— Pattern Principle

    [N]othing like asking me to answer a very hard problem in philosophy. I can answer it. But whether it is digestible or not is something else

    To begin with, It’s a straw man argument; which is why its deceptively simple. No one makes the claim that empirical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can possess. No one. Rather, only philosophers do, none still do, and scientists certainly don’t.  

    ACTUALLY, WHAT HOPPE ATTRIBUTES TO EMPIRICISTS IS NOT WHAT THE EMPIRICISTS CLAIM.
    One of the reasons why you are misunderstood is that you tend not to confront the topics you deal with head on.Hoppe is a justificationist and so he mines a particular weakness of justificationist empiricism. One you jettison justification, his “argument collapses”- Ayelam Valentine Agaliba
    (Worse, he equates science with empiricism, and empiricism with positivism.)

    And economists do not claim to be philosophers, they claim to be scientists. It is one thing to say philosophers (rationalists) say such a thing and another to say scientists, and in particular economic scientists, would say such a thing (they don’t).

    Instead, they say that we cannot trust our reason except in the most trivial of cases: those at experiential human scale. And the discipline of economics is by definition one beyond experiential human scale, or we would not need prices with which to coordinate our efforts, or property to provide us with incentives – we could just ‘sense it’. But we can’t.

    Instead, we say that, depending upon the domain of inquiry, we require logical(rational), empirical(correspondent), and operational (existentially demonstrable) trials to test our theories, because theories are prone to contain imaginary and erroneous information that must be held separate from causal information. In this sense, we do not create theories justifiably or reasonably, we instead come to theories however we do, and we criticize them by logical, empirical, operational, and falsificational means.

    Examples: in mathematics the means of investigation and the means of proof are nearly identical. But some mathematical deductions are not constructible, so intuitionism requires that once a solution is obtained by whatever means, we go back and explain it operationally, demonstrating that it can be actually constructed by means of possible mathematical operations.

    In economics, we can make empirical observations, but until we go through and describe them as a series of human actions each of which is sympathetically testable then we do not know that the theory is true even if it always produces correlative results.
    in physics we do not know the first principles of the physical world as we do in mathematics (mathematical operations), or in economics (rational human actions in response to stimuli), so we must describe the act of taking the measurements themselves in order to ensure that we are not adding imaginary content to our theories.

    The end of rationalism occurred when Einstein demonstrated that we cannot even take the concepts of time and length for granted in our premises. Bridgman demonstrated that the only want to know when we have crossed the limit of arbitrary precision assumed in the premises of our theories is when we operationally construct them – since repetition of the operations in the new context will expose the failure of prior assumptions. Popper’s falsificationism is an incomplete attempt to demonstrate that falsification is necessary to ‘narrow’ more parsimonious (precise) statements, and that criticism is the means of narrowing theories to ever greater degrees of precision.

    The only thing particularly interesting about economics is that because all human beings are able to cooperate by sympathy with intent, we can also judge whether incentives are rational (with very imprecise limits). As such we are able to subjectively test economic statements for rationality (decidability is the correct term).

    Now once we have stumbled upon a theory, in order to make a truth claim, we must demonstrate that some subset of this set of tests have been satisfied: in other words, we must warranty our statements in order to claim that we speak the truth.

    0) Sensible (intuitively possible)
    1) Meaningfully Expressible ( as an hypothesis )
    2) Internally Consistent (logically consistent – rational)
    3) Externally Correspondent, and Falsifiable ( physically testable – correlative)
    4) Existentially Possible (operationally construct-able/observable)
    5) Voluntarily “Choose-able” (voluntary exchange / rational choice)
    6) Market-Survivable (criticism – theory )
    7) Market Irrefutable (law)
    8) Irrefutable under Original Experience (Perceivable Truth)
    9) Ultimately Parsimonious Description (Analytic Truth)
    10) Informationally Complete and Tautologically Identical (Platonic Truth – Imaginary)

    ..yet not all theoretical systems necessitate most of these claims. In economics for example, we must satisfy 5, but in mathematics we solve this same problem by the axiom of choice (adding additional information), and in physics it’s meaningless.

    But the net is that if ‘knowledge’ refers to truth claims, and if all non-tautological premises are context dependent – a degree of precision – (they are), and if we cannot know the boundaries of that precision (we can’t), then all premises are theoretical(they are), and if all knowledge is then theoretical (it is) and the means of discovery are irrelevant (they are), and operational construction is instead the test of true statements, not the statements themselves, (it is), and if economic principles must be operationally constructed – praxeologically – (they must), yet not all emergent phenomenon are deducible (they aren’t) and the degree of arbitrary precision available to economic theories is extremely limited (it is), then instrumentation is necessary to measure phenomenon within the limits of arbitrary precision (it is), and minor actions will produce uncertain effects within the boundaries of arbitrary precision (they do), and that we can experiment within those bounds (we can and do). (In fact all human action takes place within the universe’s boundaries – which is why we can act in the first place.)

    Now that said, no scientist says that only empirical knowledge is true, we say only that man’s reason is frail and we require instrumentation to test it. It is irrelevant how we come to a theory, and irrelevant if we can justify it if it works, but it is through criticism that we progressively increase the content of a theory until it is the most parsimonious that we can manage for the context we consider, given the logical and physical tools at our disposal.

    FLIPPING IT AROUND
    Now, in Propertarianism I argue that scientists discovered the means of truth telling, and that philosophers(rationalists) did not – instead I argue -which isnt very hard given the twentieth century- most often, that philosophers are usually the best liars. And that the weakness in scientific argument is, that as producers of a luxury good, scientists ignore costs in the description of their theories. Whereas in economics we consider costs. So by adding our understanding of costs back into the scientific method, we discover that it’s the best truth-telling method in general that we have discovered. And that by struggling to speak the truth scientists made dramatic progress in all of their fields. This is why the scientific method is not a method, but a set of moral prescriptions for what we may claim to truthfully say and what not.

    Conversely, rationalism has been used systemically to create the most complex and destructive lies and pseudosciences known to man – most of which are moral, legal political and economic. Because it is profitable to create complex lies in those industries just as it is (often, not always) unprofitable to create complex lies in science. It’s just that by the time someone figures it out in economics and politics, the opportunity to correct it has passed, while in science their is no expiration date on the damage that can be done to one’s reputation (capital of scientists).

    So it is not just that we can come to knowledge by any means possible and criticize it by all necessary means available to us, but that rationalism has been used to lie and steal and murder more than any other discipline and that it is far more error prone than truth telling, and truth telling is a very hard thing to do.

    It is one thing to say ‘this works’ or “i can say this’ and it is another to say that you are speaking it truthfully: meaning scientifically. When you speak scientifically it is possible to be fairly certain your statements are truthful, and when you speak rationally we know only that they may be meaningful, but not necessarily truthful (scientific.)

    The world has adopted scientific language as the language of truth speaking in all fields, almost entirely because it is less prone to deception and error than rationalism.

    So in my work, I want to take what is useful from Hoppe: the reduction of all moral propositions to property rights – but I feel I must rescue liberty from the language of liars, thieves, mystics, and authoritarianism, and translate it into scientific language: the language of truth-speaking: science.

    Because while you may not be aware of it, the central reason for western superiority was our discovery of truth telling. No one else did it. And it is the reason the west separated from the rest.

    Truth speaking creates trust, trust reduces transaction costs, reduced transaction costs create economic velocity, economic velocity creates prosperity, prosperity gives us choices, and the greatest variety of choices means the satisfaction of the most subjective values.

    Truth is very expensive. It is the most expensive normative commons in the world.

    And that is why it is so rare.

    SUMMARY
    All non tautological knowledge is theoretical and contextual, and we determine what we can testify to by criticizing it, not by the means of obtaining it. The means of obtaining it is irrelevant.

    Economics, like all disciplines that investigate that which is beyond human scales of perception is a ratio-empirical discipline because we cannot observe phenomenon without instrumentation and measures, and we cannot test internal consistency without reason. The correct interpretation of praxeology is that all observable phenomenon must be open to rational construction by the decisions and actions of human beings. This applies to all disciplines. Without exception. The general hypothesis of Austrians is that distortionary activity is amplified and extended in time. this appears to be true, but at a very imprecise level and the current debate is over the trade-offs, which is why it remains unsettled. But the empirical investigation into economic phenomenon within that degree of precision (which is enormously imprecise) is necessary, and by any and all definitions, scientific. Interference in such an economy is immoral, but it is scientific, and investigation of interstitial phenomenon it is scientific. Not all phenomenon (regular patterns) are deducible from first principles, however, they must be explainable by means of deduction once discovered to be claimed as truthful.

    CLOSING
    I think i should have done a fair job of criticizing the straw man argument, providing the explanation for the fundamental questions of how science rather than the straw man of ‘empiricism’ operates, demonstrating the importance of it, and why I am working so hard to convert Hoppe’s rationalism into scientific argument – to protect it from irrelevant nonsense arguments and justifiable marginalization. I had only a few hours to work on this on and off, and I can probably improve it. But I promise that I am very good at what I do and if you work with it, you should find it very helpful. If not and I failed you I am sorry but I will keep trying to simplify the arguments further over time.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine